Let’s Prepare Tomorrow : Climate Change and Us Erasmus Project

Project Title

Let’s Prepare Tomorrow : Climate Change and Us

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 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Natural sciences; Reaching the policy level/dialogue with decision makers; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

In our school, which is turned towards languages and houses an Anglo-American section, a group of some thirty or so students from the 3e (14-15 year-olds) and their teachers are elaborating a research project whose aim it is to come to terms with the consequences of climate change on a local and European level. This will be done through personal research in sciences and geography, but also through scientific experiments and simulations. Our aim is to make our teaching meaningful by working with the families to transmit those tools which will liberate our students and turn them into fully fledged citizens. These tools are:

a) Mastery of languages, especially English, in order to communicate and develop a taste for passing on knowledge.
b) Solid basic knowledge, especially scientific and geographical in this context, in order to understand the variety of situations in which they might find themselves.
c) The necessity for rigorous analysis and working methods in order to face unexpected situations and understand the stakes.
d) Intellectual curiosity and the taste for research to act and find solutions, at each one’s level,
but also :
e) The desire to go beyond oneself, to invest in projects fully, with passion, and learn to stay involved over time in order to reach a given goal
f) An openness to other European students, in this case Norwegians, to share that which brings us together on a daily basis and allows us to understand our common European identity.

We would like to turn all our attention towards a major subject of our planet’s and humanity’s joint destinies: on-going climate change, towards its quantifiable realities and its visible consequences in the Tromsø area at first, in the arctic zone of the Svalbard archipelago as well, but also closer to home in our local region of Montpellier. This is not about doing yet another lesson but, by approaching various specific problems around climate change, giving our students an active role, as “journalists and researchers” as it were. This will be achieved through weekly workshops run by two science teachers (Physics and Biology) along with two Humanities teachers as well as two English literature teachers. This will enable the students to build up their knowledge, plant seeds of questions which they will wish to answer so as to head right on into the heart of the subject and later become spokespersons and, why not, even become a creative force around climate change.

Since January 2019, regular contacts have been established with Mrs Trude Kvaal from the Sommerlyst Skole in Tromsø, in order to prepare a school exchange project with other secondary school pupils. A first meeting beween teachers will take place in Tromsø in April 2019, supported by the DAREIC which has been technically advising us since october 2018. This school exchange should allow the students to share and compare their observations, their research and experiment results, their collected data from scientific conferences through the e-Twinning platform. Then to also become ambassadors of their work and project be it within our school, in local schools and in Norway. In this way the whole school, along with local schools, will benefit from this project to different degrees through exhibitions, reports in class, articles published on the school website… A group of 4e students (out of the 120 in that level moving into the 3e for the 2019-2020 school year) who show particular implication in the tasks and activities starting in April 2019, will become ambassadors and participate in a field trip to Tromsø as part of a school exchange with the Sommerlyst skole in April 2020 (8 days) with a possible 4 to 5 day extension to Svalbard. In this way we hope to learn from the Tromsø students who are already very active in project based learning, especially concerning sustainable development and the environment.

We are currently building contacts with scientists at Tromsø Polar Institute, as well as Tromsø University Science Center and the Svalbard University in Longyearbyen, and with the heads of the local authorities of both towns. In order to make the most of this project, 5 Montpellier teachers involved in it will go and meet their counterparts and local representatives in April 2019 so as to set the boundaries of their different actions and prepare common activities for our two classes during the mobility periods of the project. A KA229 grant would significantly reduce the cost of the trip and allow all the students showing real motivation and implication in the project, regardless of social background, to be involved in a venture which will inevitably widen their horizons and impact their lives.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 65260 Eur

Project Coordinator

COLLEGE CAMILLE CLAUDEL & Country: FR

Project Partners

• Sommerlyst skole