Es ist Zeit für mehr Nachhaltigkeit Erasmus Project

Project Title

Es ist Zeit für mehr Nachhaltigkeit

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 Schools Only

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Energy and resources; Key Competences (incl. mathematics and literacy) – basic skills; Intercultural/intergenerational education and (lifelong)learning

Project Summary

The term “Education for Sustainable Development” (ESD) was used at the UN conference on environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It describes education that empowers people, to design the future actively in a globalized world autonomously and responsibly. The aim of our project “It is time for more sustainability” was to encourage our student´s understanding of the complex relationships between globalization, economic development, consumption, environmental pollution, population development, health and social conditions in the classroom.

We used the “framework for the teaching of Global Development Education”, as a basis for curriculum development, because it offered concrete recommendations and material for teaching. Thus, three schools, Instituut Onze Lieve Vrouw van Vreugde of Roeselare, the Campus Efeuweg from Berlin-Neukölln and Notre Dame de Mongré in Mongré agreed to actively contribute to the environmental and sustainable development of their school life. Together, we reached the goal to develop guidelines that changed our school programmes with regard to sustainability and therefore we also specialized our school curriculums in the long term. We increased the willingness to sustainability of our school communities, reduced our consumption of resources and created offers that are based on health and ecological standards. Therefore we increased offers for the school community. We made sustainable weeks and projects, we implemented new school gardens and repair cafes, we met local groups which dealt with sustainability in the region, we met political members of local parliaments and informed us or debated about sustainability in the region. We did expert interviews and had a lot of workshops to learn about topics like climate change, healthy nutrition, plastic problems and so on.

Each school provided a project group of about 25 students, and according to democratic principles the coordination of teachers and students created the learning environment of the project. During the project more than 800 students and 25 teachers were part of the different projects phases.
Our partnership is special because two private Catholic schools cooperated with a school with mostly (87%) Muslim pupils who were also socially handicapped. The project showed that people with the same aim can learn a lot from each other, crossing social and intercultural borders becoming more competent with regard to democracy, intercultural values and life, language and social skills.

Learning from each other is a central point of the project, because the school Mongré provided climate experts, or eco class speakers supporting the climate detectives at the other schools. Our project “Time for more sustainability” followed the methodological approach of ESD (Education for Sustainable Development). ESD consists of three steps: identify (information gathering), rate (seeing options of individual action and identifying solutions) act (consciously reflect own and foreign orientations for life choices). Gathering information happened to prepare the three exchange meetings. The three project groups in the institutions gathered knowledge about climate, climate change, climate policy, food and nutrition, as well as garbage collection, recycling, disposal systems and the impact of waste on the environment. The students explored as climate detectives their schools in preparation of the exchange meetings using therefore mathematic skills in order to reflect their own contribution to pollution and the resource consumption of their school. They implemented competitions and exchanged their findings about the different sustainability topics. They met different people in their region to learn from and participated in different workshops to become experts themselves. These experiences were the basis for various forms of presentation such as the speed dating, ball bearings, PowerPoint or video presentations etc. which were shown at the annual project meetings. During project meetings students searched for solutions for the detected problems of their school´s problems (unhealthy school lunch, poor waste management, high energy consumption).

They developed solutions and applications for school parliaments and raised awareness of sustainable development and therefor improved school life. As another result, the students created various exhibitions on recycling, ecological economics, sustainable living etc. which were shown to the public at the end of the project meetings. Other products such as You-Tube clips “How to make your planet a better place”, posters, reports, videos, powerpoints, photos are presented at e-twinning, the school´s homepages, and on Youtube. At the end of the project our schools will still profit in the future because of the new firm offers in our schools like sustainability weeks or the congress of Neukölln or different workshop offers. Furthermore we will stay in contact with us and also the new local partners we found.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 97375 Eur

Project Coordinator

Gemeinschaftsschule Campus Efeuweg & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Instituut Onze Lieve Vrouw van Vreugde
• Notre Dame de Mongré