Climate change is a complex global problem. Through education, we can encourage changes in attitudes and behaviors in order to follow a more sustainable development path and build a generation of climate change aware citizens. We feel that it is important to integrate climate change and the environment in education in a transdisciplinary manner into existing subject areas such as science and STEM, citizenship education, geography, human rights education, arts, and language courses. We also feel that through cooperation, shared projects, and the exchange of good practices between schools from different communities, we can achieve more towards the awareness of our common and interconnected future on the planet. Our project proposal is called “What a wonderful world!” and it’s main objective is to raise awareness about climate change and environmental issues in our schools and local communities. In order to achieve this, students should develop the knowledge, skills, and competencies needed on the basis of scientific methods, disciplines, and evidence, and contribute to the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Another core objective of our project has to do with the understanding of sustainability and adopting a new mindset about our economy, energy, living style, and behavior. Also crucial to our project is cooperation and understanding that we are all part of the solution. We are aiming to produce and evaluate innovative teaching approaches to integrate quality climate change education for sustainable development in school education through interdisciplinary practices, STEM, and whole-school approach. Our team consists of six schools in five countries. Two from Spain (Valencia and Tenerife), and one from Portugal (Funchal), Italy (Venice), Greece (Florina) and Finland (Tampere), with a common interest in environmental education and climate change that brought us together. Project activities and events mainly entail the participation of students aged from 6 to 12 years old (1900 approximately), parents, teachers, and help staff from our schools. We will also include in our activities students with fewer opportunities due to special needs and disability and different kinds of marginalization such as economically and socially disadvantaged students, minority linguistic and ethnic groups. Our project also depends a lot on the cooperation with other local authorities, universities, institutions, NGOs, organizations, and local businesses. We have scheduled six LTT activities, one short-term joint staff training event in Venice, and five short-term exchanges of groups of pupils in the other participating cities that include workshops and activities for students and teachers. We have also designed 19 project events that will be implemented cooperatively during the two years of the program and include interdisciplinary STEAM activities (open source weather stations, recycling, and energy efficiency teams, theatrical teams, fashion show, documentary, etc) that will be published in our website and twin space. Evaluation will be a very important aspect of our project. That’s why we have specifically designed two project events that will act as a pre and post-test for the entire project, concerning students, teachers, and parents' knowledge of climate change and behaviors towards sustainability and environmental protection. We firmly believe that this project will have positive effects on the development of our schools, especially concerning environmental issues, sustainability, and cooperation. The educational resources derived from the project will be available with creative commons licenses so that they can be implemented, studied and improved by participating schools in their everyday practice and teaching procedures, encouraging the improvement of personal, professional and social competences of all participants. We also believe that the implementation of the project will have a significant impact on our local communities in general (households, businesses, authorities, etc). Students, teachers, parents, and other participating local organizations will act as multipliers in our effort to promote a new sustainable mindset. Some of our activities will produce final outcomes that are going to be functional even after the end of the project. For example, the open-source weather stations network will continue to work, evolve, expand and provide live data on the web from our schools, and the school energy teams will play a permanent educational role in our schools concerning the field of STEM and environmental education.
Climate change is a complex global problem. Through education, we can encourage changes in attitudes and behaviours in order to follow a more sustainable development path. In this project, we tried to integrate climate change and sustainability in school education in a transdisciplinary manner by designing, implementing and accessing various activities. The cooperation between our schools from different countries and different communities and the exchange of good practices helped us achieve more awareness of our common and interconnected future on the planet. Our main objective was to raise awareness concerning climate change and environmental issues in our schools and local communities by developing skills and competencies needed to understand scientific methods, disciplines, and evidence and contribute to the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Another core objective of our project had to do with the understanding of sustainability and adopting a new mindset about our economy, energy, living style, and behaviour. Crucial to our project was the cooperation and understanding that we are all part of the solution. We also wanted to design and implement educational materials for teaching sustainable development and climate change in school education. Our team consisted of six schools in five countries. Two from Spain (Valencia and Tenerife), one from Portugal (Funchal), one from Italy (Venice), one from Greece (Florina) and one from Finland (Tampere), with a common interest in environmental education that brought us together. Our project included one Short-term joint staff training event and five short-term exchanges of groups of pupils with workshops and activities targeted to our students and teachers. Apart from these six LTTAs, our project also included 19 local activities that were designed by the whole team. Our project also depended on cooperation with other local authorities, universities, institutions, NGOs, organizations, and local businesses. Evaluation was a very important aspect of our project. That’s why we had specifically designed two project events that acted as pre and post-tests for the entire project, concerning students, teachers, and parents' knowledge of climate change and perceptions towards sustainability and environmental protection. We firmly believe that this project will have positive effects on the development of our schools, especially concerning environmental issues, sustainability, and cooperation. The educational resources derived from the project are available with Creative Commons licenses so that they can be implemented, studied and improved by other schools in their everyday practice and teaching procedures, encouraging the improvement of personal, professional and social competencies of all participants. We also believe that the implementation of the project has a significant impact on our local communities in general (households, businesses, authorities, etc). Students, teachers, parents, and other participating local organizations act as multipliers in our effort to promote a new sustainable mindset. Some of our activities produced final outcomes that are going to be functional even after the end of the project. For example, the open-source weather stations network will continue to work, evolve, expand and provide live data on the web from our schools, and the school energy teams will play a permanent educational role in our schools concerning the field of STEM and environmental education.