CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION Climate change offers an open door to students’ re-engagement in science Erasmus Project

Project Title

CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION
Climate change offers an open door to students’ re-engagement in science

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: Pedagogy and didactics; Natural sciences; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

“The programme will also support the testing of innovative practices to prepare learners, staff and youth workers to become true factors of change (e.g. save resources, reduce energy use and waste, compensate carbon footprint emissions, opt for sustainable food and mobility choices, etc.). Priority will also be given to projects that –through education, training, youth and sport activities -enable behavioural changes for individual preferences, consumption habits, and lifestyles.”
Erasmus+ 2020 Programme

“Students who are best prepared for the future are CHANGE AGENTS”.
OECD, “Education 2030”, 2018

CHALLENGE

The project addresses two of the most urgent challenges in EU:
– creating new, much more attractive and innovative science learning in secondary schools
– engaging the young generation in climate change prevention and preparing them to act on climate change in the near and far future

Climate change engagement offers science education the most promising way to create fundamentally new and attractive ways for young teenagers to create deep interests in science, as climate change provides a wide range of scientific challenges, offers the young students a strong sense of relevance and importance – and at the same time offers them hitherto unseen opportunities to learn science through accomplishing important real-life missions in their communities.

This unique opportunity, this unique momentum should not be lost to EU science education innovation.

EU RESPONSE TO CHALLENGE

The Commission’s long-term strategies strongly support the idea of using climate change prevention as a platform for creating more attractive science education.
The Commission has for many years invited experimentation with engaging the young students in real-life science and innovation activities, going far beyond traditional classroom teaching; in particular in secondary school as joint research clearly states that the young people precisely create their “science images” in the teenage years.
At the same time the Commission strongly urges all citizens, and the young generations in particular, to engage in climate change prevention: in school, in the families, in the community and globally.
One might say that the deep engagement of the young generations in climate change prevention is the most important success criteria for any local or global climate change prevention.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENT

The project is one of the first projects in EU to use climate change engagement as a platform for innovative science learning.
Doing this is a major accomplishment in itself and the outcomes of the project will be of tremendous importance to secondary schools, science teachers and students from across EU.

Supporting this accomplishment is the fact that the project will not bring climate change action and science learning innovation together at a rhetoric or theoretical level.
On the contrary, it will build its results on students’ direct, real-life and mission based accomplishments.
The resources the project will offer secondary schools as a result of the project will therefore be intuitively usable to teachers and students.

KEY INNOVATION

A series of further Erasmus+ experimentation is expected to build on and refer to this first opening project.

The project includes 4 integrated and mutually reinforcing innovations:
– it uses climate change engagement as a platform for engaging and re-engaging young students in science learning
– it will engage the young students in real-life and important climate change prevention missions, not simply create “awareness” among the young students
– it will base the students’ engagement on the new open science schooling methodology, strongly recommended by the Commission and leading research, and tested through successful Erasmus+ projects
– it will allow teenage girls to re-engage in science learning, as climate change prevention is known to be of great importance to in particular female students (it is not accidental that Greta Thunberg is a female teenager)

KEY RESULTS

The key outcomes will be co-created by teachers and students to ensure a high relevance to teachers and students from across EU.

They will be based on the documentation of the student teams’ climate change missions.

The project has 4 target audiences, and it will create dedicated outcomes to all target audiences.

The 4 target audiences and related dedicated outcomes are:

YOUNG STUDENTS and SCIENCE TEACHERS AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Outcome 1: The school guide to climate change education
Outcome 2: Why teenage girls will engage in climate change based science education
Outcome 3: The climate change education Video

POLICY MAKERS IN THE FIELD OF SCIENCE EDUCATION INNOVATION
Outcome 4: A future-directed platform to engage teenage students in science

POLICY MAKERS IN THE FIELD OF CLIMATE CHANGE PREVENTION
Outcome 5: Engaging the young generations in climate change prevention through innovative science education

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 288759 Eur

Project Coordinator

PROFESSIONSHOJSKOLEN ABSALON S/I & Country: DK

Project Partners

• Working with Europe/Treballant amb Europa Associació
• SREDNJA ELEKTRO-RACUNALNISKA SOLA MARIBOR
• Instituto de Enseñanza Secundaria “La Madraza”
• Pasvalio Levens pagrindine mokykla
• Platon M.E.P.E.
• Liceum Ogólnokształcące z Oddziałami Dwujęzycznymi im. Adama Mickiewicza
• Szczecinska Szkola Wyzsza Collegium Balticum