According to the results of contemporary European surveys, it is obvious that Europe is facing with crucial water-related challenges, however citizens aren’t informed enough about risks. As Eurobarometer reflects in its latest research (2012), fewer than 37% of the respondents felt well or very well informed in the EU about water-related environmental problems, meanwhile 20-40% of Europe’s available water resources are wasted due to inadequate industrial or residential usage. Therefore, there is a significant need for a more suitable background for public awareness raising and the development of environmental skills. To support this aim, one of the key segments is the environmental education in primary schools that can effectively foster the dissemination of ecological thinking of younger generations through sensitizing them with innovative pedagogical methodologies and learning materials. This is why we propose Wat.Edu that will directly help teachers to implement state-of-art learning materials and methodologies in water-focused environmental education with 12-14-year-old students to create better conditions for environmental education. During the entire lifetime of Wat.Edu we envisage to reach and involve over 800 stakeholders including primary school teachers addressing 12-14-year-old students and specialised in one of the following fields of education: i) social and ii) natural sciences, iii) arts and iv) water technology. Beside, we also foresee organising numerous learning events to be held on local and transnational levels whether in the form of indoor or outdoor activities where we plan to involve at least 100 pupils from each country. The project will run during 32 months and partners have already agreed main responsibilities according to the expertise and profile of each participant. Activities will be coordinated by elected Activity Leaders who will be in charge of coordinating work carried out by partners participating in each activity. To reach objectives the below activities are foreseen: - Elaboration of innovative and experiential Wat.Edu Handbook and Teaching Methodological Guide for state-of-art environmental education - Development of E-Learning Toolkit for the Handbook - Implementation of the designed pedagogy with testing purposes including • 5-day-long joint staff training event to prepare teachers from participating schools on the new pedagogy • 7-day-long international camp for students from the involved primary schools to foster both joint learning activities in accordance with the elaborated methodology and their transnational interactions As for desired results, successful implementation of the project will: - establish an exemplary cooperation mechanism between educational institutions and other sectors committed with education and environmental matters in order to elaborate and promote an innovative water-close educational methodology for improving both environmental awareness and skills of students - ensure that the innovative pedagogy is flexible, easily adaptable and accessible allowing any teacher and/or educational institution active in the field of environmental education to carry out interactive, entertaining and experiential learning activities with their students in water-close environment - raise awareness on current practices in experiential learning applied through water-focused environmental education proposed by Wat.Edu - disseminate the intellectual outputs for at least 20 professionals on local level (in each country) with all necessary skills and knowledge to be able to apply the newly developed experiential, water-close pedagogy in their daily teaching practices - improve participating students' key competences with special focus on water-related environmental and social challenges Through implementation, we envisage the following long-term impacts at regional, national and European levels: - improved international cooperation and exchange of best practices in the field of environmental education and experiential learning among educational institutions and other organisations - primary school teachers equipped with new skills and knowledge in the field of environmental education to design interactive, inspiring and entertaining indoor and outdoor learning activities where children will be able to new skills and knowledge while understanding interlinkage between the different school subjects and our “real world" - stakeholders (mainly primary schools) informed about the new water-close experiential pedagogy through well-targeted promotional activities - Wat.Edu recognised as a showcase and schools from other countries motivated to use, adapt and/or modify our learning activities - new cooperation opportunities for extending the project identified and exploited - relevant policy makers aware on the importance of taking measures for promoting environmental education and flexible learning pathways in primary schools from a multidisciplinary perspective
The Wat.Edu project was created within the framework of the Erasmus KA2 application. Our main goal was the elaboration of an innovative supplementary learning material that helps the teachers with the improvement of students aged 12-14 concerning their water-related knowledge. The Wat.Edu Handbook and the Methodological Guide together with the E-learning toolkit based on gamification are the results of great cooperation. Four schools and NGOs of four countries – Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary- worked together to create a flexible, modern learning material. The elaboration of the theoretical part was the responsibility of professional institutions dealing with environmental education and sustainability, while the methodology was based on the experiences of the participating schools. With this Handbook, our aim was to provide the teachers dealing with 12-14-year-old students with easy-to-use, inspiring methodological material, which can also enhance the creative thinking of students. We speak about a cross-curricular topic, yet we felt it needed to relate in some way to the subject frameworks used in educational structures. Therefore, we separated the tasks and activities according to the following subjects: Biology, Geography, Chemistry-Physics, and Arts. The separation is only of a technical nature, the development of a complex approach has been an important aspect for us all along, we wanted to present this important element of our environment from the aspect of several subjects. The three years of the project process was greatly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, especially concerning digital education. To react to this, our partnership elaborated O3, an extra supplementary material besides the Handbook, which can be used effectively in online education. During the period of testing the innovative professional material, we actively operated Water Club groups consisting of a community of children, where the goal was to test the curriculum in practice. In addition, we presented the developed professional material to interested teachers and heads of institutions in the framework of continuous teacher workshop sessions. At the national dissemination events, in addition to teachers, representatives of universities, colleges and other interested parties involved in teacher training were also given information about the work done. The feedback from the educators and the experience of the Water Club sessions helped a lot in shaping the final form of the Handbook and e-learning. We permanently informed the public on the Wat.Edu website, on our official Facebook site, via newsletters, and the various channels of media. Very important milestones of the project process were the three-day-long online international teacher training and the student camp. The latter was also organized as a virtual event. These programs provided opportunities to test the project outputs in real situations. Compared to the planned format. we had to redesign these project elements due to the Covid. Despite the aggravating factors, we were able to provide useful experiences and spent memorable time together. Educational institutions are showing great interest in the completed project products, which is a positive result in itself, but it is not enough. After the end of the epidemic situation, it will hopefully be possible to implement demonstration sessions for interested schools, counseling for mentoring, and support for the adaptation process. The goal is to use the developed professional material as widely as possible in order to educate students about the environment and protect water.