Education Partnership Spotlight: Glasgow Caledonian Students Bring Together Talking Trees and Slapstick Comedy

‘For me, it’s been quite influential,’ Media and Communications student Erin McGurk explains about her time studying at Glasgow Caledonian, and the inclusion of the albert sustainability module. ‘Not even just the filmmaking aspect of the course, but also my everyday life sustainability-wise. Literally the other day, I went for a hybrid car rather than a petrol because I know how I can do my part for the environment.’

Building on the wealth of information that’s out there these days, the module helped refocus Erin’s understanding on how each individual can take part in their area of work as well as everyday life. ‘With the help of albert, I feel that I can get a better education when it comes to what I want to do as a work practice, be it through after university or just creating films. It’s been genuinely helpful, and I genuinely recommend it to universities, colleges, people in general.’ 

‘We worked on a brief that had to be based around nature,‘ Erin explains the short she and Dylan created, Shooting the Breeze, for the course at Glasgow Caledonian University. ‘The idea came from research where we found that trees communicate with each other through their roots, and it’s all connected underground.’ This is called a mycorrhizal network (sometimes nicknamed ‘the wood-wide web’), which connects plants so they can transfer water and other resources. ‘I thought it was a really cool concept that, if trees can talk to each other, what’s a hyper realistic way you can take that ‘in a daft sense,’ as I put it to my teacher.’