The project aimed to raise awareness of the need to incorporate environmental sustainability (ES) and green entrepreneurship (GE) primarily in educational curricula for kindergarten teachers and by extension for all students. Green GUARDens sought to provide innovative training material for teachers’ education on these topics through a Virtual Learning Lab (VLL), ensuring that teachers are fully equipped to transfer adequate education on ES and GE to their students. By teachers serving as role-models, demonstrating greener behaviours to their students through formal education that utilises experiential & gamified learning, the project aimed to foster the development of young environmentally-conscious citizens. A special effort was made to facilitate the inclusion of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children and teachers, who have even fewer opportunities to engage with ES and GE practices. Another innovation of the project is that it takes ES and GE a step further via capacity building for teachers to help them realise that kindergartens are not simply educational institutions, but also enterprises with a corporate social responsibility to practice ES.
In an era where we are faced with severe climate threats, environmental sustainability (ES) has been made a key priority through the UNSDGs, the EU’s Green Deal and the ESD Framework which is recognized as a key instrument for achieving the former. The role of education is highly emphasised in the fight towards sustainability. To address these global challenges, incorporating both ES and GE (green entrepreneurship) in preschools is crucial for several reasons. Today, most teachers have been given very few academic and professional opportunities to learn about ES and GE, since these concepts were largely absent from university curricula as well, leaving them with few opportunities to include them in preschool classrooms. Another important problem is the lack of ready-made material and methodology on these concepts, which is a deterrent to children's effective engagement with them. This is why the project aspires to engage kindergarten teachers in ES and GE through theoretical and practical tools to become role-models and effectively transfer knowledge to their students.