Developing Competencies of Teachers to integrate Climate Literacy in European Schools

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing mankind in our time. Over the 21st century, climate scientists expect Earth’s temperature to continue increasing, very likely more than it did during the 20th century. This will affect almost every aspect of human society, including economic prosperity, human and environmental health, and national security. It’s up to all of us to build that new sustainable society. So it’s mandatory that we start by making people aware of how their actions impact the Earth. We must fully understand what our footprint really is. Only then we can start doing things differently and create a Climate Literate Society.
Education is an essential element of the global response to climate change. It helps people understand and address the impact of global warming, increases “climate literacy” among young people, encourages changes in their attitudes and behaviour, and helps them adapt to climate change related trends. Although the role of education in addressing the challenges of climate change is increasingly recognized, The school curriculum still fails to reflect the urgency of the climate crisis.
The project aims at enhancing teachers' profiles to coach students effectively in European Secondary schools to raise the level of climate literacy by developing:
Educational Content for Climate Literacy
Open Online Course to allow teachers to promote climate literacy at schools
Online Teacher Community including activities developed to assist them to bring the topic of climate change into their classrooms.
We will create an educational framework integrating the core aspects of digital technology, citizenship competences and climate change. Using this framework, we will develop an open online course for the teachers of each partner country. Alongside this, we will also develop an online teacher community where European teachers can privately learn and share their respective experiences about climate change which encourage people to action. A multilingual website will share these stories. Competence assessment tools will ensure learning can be monitored and evaluated, and training resources created so teachers can ‘self-train’ to implement the project post-funding.
We will resource, implement, disseminate and evaluate three central intellectual outputs in order to reach our target beneficiaries and achieve our objectives.
The partnership is set up between six different organisations including three universities-Estonia, Sweden, Belgium, two NGOs-Germany and Turkey and one private company from Turkey in a cross sectoral way.
As a result of the project, we expect to have created a long-term benefit on teachers and students comprising digital tools and curriculum linked learning resources.