“We cannot want the disappearance of what we love”. François Bernard is convinced of this, and thinks that this maxim would apply very well to the Earth and to raising awareness about the seriousness of the climate change in progress. To show it, this somewhat atypical techno teacher went very far. Literally as figuratively. Until boarding a 3rd class dand his establishment Fénelon-Notre Dame from La Rochelle to Svalbard Islands.
The archipelago, under the Norwegian flag, is 3,600 km north of La Rochelle, and a few thousand from the North Pole. This is the territory of the polar bear, and also where the best observable global warming. “Svalbard is warming seven times faster than the rest of the planet. Like nowhere else on Earth”, recalls the glaciologist Heidi Sevestre In Tomorrow is us (edition of the Faubourg)the book that retraces this adventure in which she has been involved since the beginning.
Get rid of the shackles of school
Nevertheless, at the beginning of April, on this archipelago made up of 60% ice, the temperatures still hover around -10°C, with minimums at -17°C. It was at this time of year that François Bernard and his college students set foot in this white desert, at the end of the world. A first group in 2018, a second a year later. Each time for ten days.
If it is often this astonishing journey that we remember, François Bernard’s educational project is far from being limited to that. “Tomorrow is us”, it is first an option that the techno teacher managed to convince the director of his establishment to launch. Two to three hours per week devoted to climate change.
No blackboard lessons, no exams or homework assignments. François Bernard intends to get rid of the usual shackles of the school, “which trains to enter the system and not in life”, he depicts, not tender. The two hours are constructed from the press reviews that the students prepare, the questions they raise, the answers they find there, in particular with Heidi Sevestre, whose video presentations are one of the red threads of the option.
“Recreating an emotional connection with nature”
The other is therefore the expedition to Svalbard. This shock trip to the bedside of glaciers and sea ice that François Bernard has always had in mind, and which convinced the French glaciologist – who did four years of doctorate on the archipelago – to join the adventure. The expedition is complex to organize – financially already – and is not without question either. “Inevitably, the carbon footprint is contradictory with the project,” concedes François Bernard. But the teacher sticks to it and makes it the first pillar of his pedagogical project: “educating through emotions”, he repeats, convinced that it is they who push to move. Declined to climate change, “this involves (re) creating an affective, emotional link between students and nature, continues the teacher, lamenting that we have too often lost it, “to the point of no longer understanding our place of humans in the chain of life on Earth”.
Question nature, college students are served in Svalbard, between excursion on a glacier, going up a fjord by boat. And even, for the second class, a scientific expedition over two days, with a night in a tent. All punctuated by multiple meetings with the population and local scientists. Mission successful? “I regularly receive emails from former students or their parents telling me that this option marked them for life. One of them, Thibault, even undertook studies to become the future Heidi. »
“Tomorrow is us” continues
Above all, even if François Bernard had to take a step back for health reasons, other teachers took over. So much so that “Tomorrow is us” still continues at Fénelon-Notre Dame and now brings together, each year and in the same class, around thirty students from 3rd to 12th grade.
If Svalbard is no longer on the program, the school year is always marked by an expedition in the great outdoors. This week, the class was in the Alps, with a detour to the Mer des Glace, another strong symbol of climate change. For the rest of the year, “Tomorrow is us”, which has also become an association, struggles to raise awareness and act locally. From the organization of “the week for the climate” in the establishment to the creation of a card game to estimate the carbon footprint of its activities, through the animation of a website to facilitate environmental initiatives in schools, and many other projects. The whole thing was rewarded with the Citizen Education Prize just a year ago.
So why not “Tomorrow is us” in all schools? François Bernard and his students wrote to this effect to Jean-Michel Blanquer [l’ancien ministre de l’Education nationale] and Pap Ndyaie [l’actuel]. Without much success, they are sorry. This is the whole paradox pointed out by François Bernard: “Beautiful things are happening in primary school, in particular through the rise of schools outside. But also in higher education, with more and more students asking for the creation of subjects dedicated to climate change, he begins. But in high school, and even worse in college, there is almost nothing. Just a few notions embedded in the programs, mainly in SVT. »
Other François Bernards?
The teacher consoles himself by telling himself that there are, in France, highly motivated colleagues to launch projects in the same vein as “Tomorrow is us”. Again, the techno teacher says he receives regular testimonials, “even more since the release of the book”. “Some have notably succeeded in freeing up European funds and have gone to Iceland or Greenland…”, he says, with a small caveat all the same for this adventurer at heart. “These projects remained quite academic and did not go as far, I think, as “Tomorrow is us” in the direct link with nature. »
Go see Frosted Heads, he advises before hanging up. The film, released in February, follows a Segpa class at the foot of Mont-Blanc, mobilized by their head teacher to try to stop the melting of a local glacier by protecting it with giant white tarpaulins, like the Italians did on the Presena glacier. A fiction, of course, “but it gives ideas”, launches François Bernard. The hardest part of listening to him is getting started.