START: STudents´ Action and Role in the EnvironmenT Erasmus Project

Project Title

START: STudents´ Action and Role in the EnvironmenT

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; Social/environmental responsibility of educational institutions; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

The educational entities nowadays face a real challenge being required to prepare their youngest students for the future where they will be growing up likely to be responsible for developing serious climate change solutions, and also mostly suffering its consequences. This demand will continue to rise as the effects of climate change continue and therefore a real effort is required to properly prepare them. Whereas it is going to take its time for climate change school education to become fully formalised (as it already happened in Europe only in Italy and only the very last year, 2019), there are many recurring ideas and needs frequently brought up about by many institutions as to how to take a step forward and start introducing effective measures at schools and students´ communities.

Moreover, given the high levels of climate change concern in the Portuguese society, the Gallup study showed that levels of knowledge on climate change were however still quite low in Portugal with one of the lowest rates of self-reported understanding of the issue and the society always saw the global context as more serious than the local one, according to the National Inquiry on Portuguese Representations and Practices).
Also the European Commission in 2019 stated that climate change should be embedded in education as it affects not only the environment but also the social fabric and our everyday lives. Paradoxically, a global strike with children absent from classes only reminds us of a need to better tackle climate change back at schools, and communities.

This said, despite the growing concern of the likelihood of global environmental, emotional, demographic social and economic climate change consequences, teachers are faced with many doubts as there is no agreement about what methods prove to be most effective. The purpose of this Partnership is therefore to first exchange and then commonly debate, research and combine our 3 partners´:

-Castro Verde Schools Group from Portugal,
-Belsky Les School from Czech Republic, and
-Nongovernmental organisation and training centre PASOS ( Platform of Sustainable and Solidarity Solutions) from Spain

best practices in formal and non-formal methods in order to create and widely disseminate a guide on how to best implement climate change education at schools and students´ communities.

It will also include the innovative social perspective encompassing such aspects as emotional management of a modern concept of eco-anxiety, intergenerational or intercultural approach towards climate change, just to name a few.

The project´s most important activities will include 3 LTTAs: 2 3-days long study visits in Portugal and Czech Republic and a 7-days long course in Spain, a period of joint intellectual work to create the interactive book, testing of the book through workshops, 3 dissemination events, 1 in each partner country, Internal Workshops for other staff who did not participate in the training and project directly and a series of Action Groups community initiatives as teachers often express concern about parents’ and carers´responses to climate change,

By these actions we also wish to reinforce the individual students´ responsibility in relation to the consequences of climate change seeing that with the recent Climate Movement it is a perfect time to further engage them.

As for some of the results and sustainable impacts, our Strategic Partnership will include the methods from the IO and best practices gained during the LTTAs in their everyday model of education and the book will be used by us to train our new employees and others interested, being a constant source of easily understandable and publicly available training materials.

In addition, our teams will maintain contact with each other as well as with people and representatives of schools, organizations and institutions who attend our multiplier events and workshops, and will continue to work on climate change in the context of raising awareness and actions among our entities´ staffs and students, also in the view of possible further creation of new initiatives stemming from our START (STudents´ Action and Role in the EnvironmenT) project.

The book itself will be constructed on the basis of an autodidactic course, giving its readers the opportunity to implement either the whole package or just selected activities and topics, depending on their needs and contexts and this way will be easily adapted to other target groups due to the universality of the discussed topic and emphasis on working on everyday life´s practices. As for our philosophy, similarly to what Italian Education Ministry said about climate change topic being a sort of “Trojan horse that will infiltrate all courses¨, similar approach is therefore needed and intended by our project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 126432 Eur

Project Coordinator

Agrupamento de Escolas de Castro Verde & Country: PT

Project Partners

• Plataforma de alternativas sostenibles y solidarias
• Zakladni skola B. Dvorskeho