A lesson in sustainabiltity: Make your school greener and yourself too Erasmus Project

Project Title

A lesson in sustainabiltity: Make your school greener and yourself too

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 : School Exchange Partnerships

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Environment and climate change; EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy

Project Summary

Context

The topic of sustainability is experiencing an increased interest within schools. Education plays an essential role in generating awareness and cultivating understanding of sustainability. Therefore, sustainability is one of the key issues to enable young people to participate in society. Besides imparting knowledge and skills, the focus is on judgment and taking action. The earlier the topic is introduced, the more likely it is that a critical examination of the subject will result, which will ultimately lead to conscious action. If fostering sustainability is done in an intercultural, interdisciplinary and European partnership context, the goal of the UN‘s 2030 Agenda, is all the more fulfilled. The outlined project offers the opportunity to achieve far more effective results and to perceive the diversity of European natural areas and the biodiversity to be protected.

Aims

The aim is to use the cooperation of the European partner schools to raise awareness that all those involved are at the same time part of the problem and the solution: therefore, everyone should start to reconsider their actions and to take on a more sustainable lifestyle. Specifically, this means using the project to establish a sustainability agenda in all partner schools, which makes it possible to integrate the topic of sustainability into the teaching of the various subjects, to achieve long-term savings in energy and resources and avoid waste, and to make school trips more sustainable as well as providing experimental learning places. Ultimately, all students and teachers involved in the project should become multipliers who pass on knowledge and change behaviour in their personal environment, thereby establishing sustainability in everyday life.

Participants

Members of the project are the General Lyceum of Paralias in Patra, Greece, the IIS Leonardo da Vinci – Nitti in Potenza, Italy, the IES Pablo Picasso in Málaga, Spain, the Traku gimnazija in Trakai, Lithuania and the Daniel Theysohn IGS in Waldfischbach-Burgalben, Germany.
This project is carried out by students between the ages of 14 and 19, with groups of 25 to 30 pupils per school. Between 6 and 8 teachers from different subjects per school will be involved in the project. The caretakers, secretaries and social workers are also involved by helping to implement the agenda in practice. Parents are involved in the project with regard to the planning and implementation of the mobility.

Activities

Each participating school develops its sustainability agenda to provide long-term strategies for saving resources as well as avoiding waste etc. Furthermore, the sustainability agenda includes ideas of how to incorporate sustainability in the curriculum in order to anchor the topic of sustainability in everyday teaching of various subjects.
The more sustainable design of school trips is to be achieved by testing sustainable trips during the mobility.
The visits to extracurricular venues which show examples of sustainability as well measuring and evaluating environmentally relevant data, (e.g. air quality) also serve the education for more sustainable behaviour.
All in all, the background knowledge and practical experience provided by workshops during the mobilities help the participants become more sustainable on a routine basis. This concerns many aspects of everyday life such as food, cosmetics, travel, upcycling, responsible consumerism etc. Finally, the results of the project are put together in a sustainability guide. This guide will be made available both in print and in digital form and contains tips for producing sustainable products, recipes, background knowledge about sustainability, a project-based multilingual vocabulary, etc.

Methods

The activities of the LTTAs should be interlinked with the largest possible number of teaching subjects, whereby the pupils should learn primarily experimentally and action-oriented. Above all, methods in the areas of examining, evaluating, documenting and presenting are practiced. At the end of each LTTA, the pupils create learning products in order to transfer the knowledge they have acquired into the daily teaching of their school. This should mainly be realized in the form of interactive educational games or presentations.

Expected results and long-term use

The project will have a long-term positive impact across the whole school community. Among the students, we expect that what has been learned and the will to reflect and implement more sustainable action will be internalized. As for the teachers, we expect them to set example of sustainable action, carry out an interdisciplinary exchange and anchor the content in the classroom. The parents are expected to participate in a more sustainable behaviour at home as well as in school activities concerning sustainability. The sustainability agenda becomes a permanent part of the school profile and the sustainability guide (booklet) will be available for long-term use.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 152520 Eur

Project Coordinator

Daniel Theysohn IGS Waldfischbach-Burgalben & Country: DE

Project Partners

• IES Pablo Picasso
• IIS “L. da Vinci – Nitti”
• GENIKO LYKEIO PARALIAS
• Traku gimnazija