Industrialization, globalization and modern consumer society have led to changes and problems in the fields of environment and climate. Especially industrial nations have to find solutions to those changes and problems, before irreversible damage has been done. Those solutions have to be found on different levels, though. Many people expect solutions on the political level - be it the regional, national, European or even global ones - via laws, treaties, contracts etc.. But there is only a rudimentary awareness that each citizen can and has to contribute to the solution, too, by having a personal lifestyle that is, for instance, characterized by the effort to save energy and avoid refuse. School is an institution whose teaching mission includes teaching students to act responsibly in society and at the same time it is a place, where such behaviour should be practised. This is the reason why it is one key objective of our project to enable the participants as well as other members of our school communities to recognize and understand problems in the fields of environment and energy consumption and, ideally, initiate a change in their personal lifestyles - so theory and practice work hand in hand. The participants from the five schools will approach each aspect of the topic from their own point of view, which is influenced by the region / country they live in, and come to fresh approaches / solutions by sharing their thoughts. We will mainly choose the participants for the project among the members of our Erasmus Plus school clubs since self-motivation and commitment with regard to the topic at hand are desirable, especially since those students will present the results of the project meetings to other students and teachers at our schools. In general, it is of great importance to make sure that as many members of our school communities are either included in the project directly or profit from its results. The project consists of five modules, each of which deals with one aspect of the topic: - Saving the environment 1 - Creating public awareness - Saving the environment 2 - How to avoid refuse?! - Saving energy 1 - How to save energy?! - Saving energy 2 - Eco-friendly food - Saving resources - Turning trash into art We will work on one of those modules at each of the project meetings. Each project meeting will have a similar structure: in preparation of the meeting the participants of each partner school will create a presentation on the topic of the module, in which they present their own situation, the situation at their school and / or the situation in their country. Those presentations are then given in front of all the participants at the beginning of the project meeting, which leads to a change of perspective and a widening of each participant's horizon with regard to the topic. These presentations will serve as the basis for tasks, which the students will then have to work on in groups that consist of students from each school, and which will have tangible results: - a "flashmob" on the topics of "ecological problems / eco-friendly behaviour" (project meeting 1) - a flyer which gives advice on how the avoid refuse (project meeting 2) - a poster which gives advice on how to save energy (project meeting 3) - a seal of quality for eco-friendly food (project meeting 4) - a "turning refuse into art" exhibition (project meeting 5) The results of project meetings 2,3 and 4 will first be presented at the school that hosts the meeting and later at the partner schools. They will be presented to students and teachers who participate directly in the project as well as to students and teachers who don't. There will be a vote on the best product (flyer, poster,...) each time, since the best products of all the modules will be presented at the final project meeting, and then be published and spread at all the schools in the native languages and via TwinSpace. In addition to that a film about the project work will be made at all the project meetings and published at the schools and on TwinSpace. The potential long-term effects of the results of our project are that the flyers, posters, videos, and seals of quality might have an effect on the lifestyle of those who see them and might also lead to changes at our schools (e.g. avoidance of trash, less energy consumption, food from regional sources at the school cafeterias). Our main objective is to contribute with our project work and its results to the development of a general strategy at our schools with regard to eco-friendly behaviour.
In a pre-pandemic world in which climate change and its consequences were an important topic, one key objective of our project was to prepare the ground for an overall strategy at our schools for teaching an eco-friendly and sustainable lifestyle. That is why we decided to deal with the following aspects of the topic during the five project meetings: - Saving the environment 1 - Creating public awareness (Mittersill) - Saving the environment 2 - How to avoid refuse?! (Chiavenna) - Saving energy 1 - How to save energy?! (Ikaalinen) - Saving energy 2 - Eco-friendly food (Jurbarkas) - Saving resources - Turning trash into art (Simmern) While the first project meeting in Mittersill – with a flashmob in Mittersill’s market square as its climax – took place as previously planned, the Covid-19 pandemic – and later the start of the war in Ukraine – made it very difficult for us to carry out the rest of the project work. Achieving the key objective mentioned above moved out of range since our schools had to focus on entirely different things, namely to make sure that lessons could take place at all. Nevertheless, we held the four project meetings that still had to be done starting in November 2021 to create the basis for further work on the overall strategies in post-crisis times. Apart from the fact that we had to change the order in which the meetings took place slightly and that the schools from Finland and Austria couldn’t take part in one meeting each (or only online), the project meetings took place, by and large, the way we had originally planned them: before the meetings, the students involved created videos and / or presentations, in which their own local / national point of view on the topic the meeting dealt with became apparent. During the meetings those videos / presentations were used as the starting point for the conversation with the European partners. Afterwards, students worked in groups with students from the other schools in order to come up with ideas / possible solutions, which were then presented to all the participants and additional members of the school hosting the meeting. In addition to that there were activities with local partners, e.g. from the fields of waste disposal, energy supply and environmental technology, which didn’t only widen the participants’ horizons, but also became starting points for future cooperations on a local level. The results of the meetings were presented to the other project participants at each school and presented to a wider public in several ways (social media, display cabinets, articles (local papers, school homepage, yearbooks). But the votes on the best flyers, posters etc. didn’t take place the way we had originally intended. One reason for this was that the project meetings took place in extremely difficult circumstances and some of them had to take place with very little time between them, which meant that all participants were under constant immense pressure. Nevertheless, we achieved many goals that are directly related to the topic, as well as some non-cognitive ones, e.g. in the fields of language and intercultural competence, by working together under such extreme conditions. Working together on a topic that should be at the top of the agenda again – also at schools – as soon as the situation with regard to Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine has improved again, created a feeling of togetherness. As for the future, we plan to use some of the project’s results and the impulses created by it – also with the help of some of the partners from outside school we worked with – to achieve the goal of creating environmental strategies for our schools as soon as this becomes possible again.