For students from five Tyrolean schools, the school year 2019/2020 started with a kick-off event, in which they had the opportunity to discuss the issue of climate change and arising questions regarding the project with local climate change scientists and activists, as well as one politician of the state government and a former project student.
Since the research-education co-operation features small projects about climate change, individually developed, chosen and worked out by the students in class during the school year, the project team trained them how to develop their projects in small groups. For the development of first ideas and impulses for their small projects, they were familiarised with the technique of ‘Wanderidee’ (like an ‘idea cycle’) during the kick-off event.
The other project schools located in Upper Austria and Bavaria (Germany) organized their own kick-off event to initiate the k.i.d.Z.21 project year 2019/2020.
We are looking forward to discovering all students’ climate change projects and we will meet them at the end of the school year 2019/2020 during the Alpine Research Week in the High Alpine Mountain Area in Austria! We hope that we will get the possibility to meet our students as scheduled later this year, but this is uncertain as of now.
Climate Change Education within the open-schooling network
Previous IPCC reports make it evident that Global Climate Change is one of the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century world society must handle.
Innovative learning and teaching methods to foster climate literacy and awareness among the young generation, the ones who will be the most prone to future climate impacts.
Therefore, young people should be promoted according to the Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development programme of the UNESCO, as education is essential to the response to climate change.
The aim of the open-schooling network in SEAS is to raise young students’ awareness, competencies and critical engagement towards climate change in a moderate constructivist transdisciplinary setting.
Since the k.i.d.Z.21 concept has been already approved since 2012 and modified due to a continuously scientific monitoring (quantitative and qualitative), the aim within SEAS is at the one hand to acquire further schools and refine the school concept to the SEAS project and to apply SEAS tools in some participating school classes. A further aim is to refine the overall concept, so that the project can be ‘globally assessed’ and compared internationally between the partner open-schooling networks within SEAS.
We are looking forward to providing you with further news about the project process in SEAS!
