Project Aims
The Project of Environmental Education programme aims to support students in acquiring and developing key skills that will have a fundamental impact on their ability to establish correct relations with the environment and better understand the problems and possible solutions. This will also increase their awareness and ability to dialogue with the environment as responsible citizens.
The programme sets out to explore a series of critical topics and provide practical and effective educational tools with a strong focus on caring for the environment and sustainable growth.
Background
In today’s society, the environment is influenced more than ever by human activities. Therefore, our relationship with the environment should be one of the issues to which humanity should pay more attention to. On the one hand, pollution, waste and other environmental problems caused by human activity are increasing every day, on the other hand, the availability of information is growing, making it difficult for young people to understand and be aware of existing threats and opportunities.
Promoting the acquisition of environmental competences and skills is, therefore, more and more a primary objective of schools.
The development of an Environmental Education programme aims to support students in acquiring and developing key skills that will have a fundamental impact on their ability to establish correct relations with the environment and better understand the problems and possible solutions. This will also increase their awareness and ability to dialogue with the environment as responsible citizens. The project sets out to explore a series of critical topics and provide practical and effective educational tools with a strong focus on caring for the environment and sustainable growth.
Course curriculum
The objective is to develop a complete, clear and easy-to-use programme covering the most significant topics linked to the environment and sustainable growth, in order to allow the students to understand the current and future threats, challenges and opportunities offered by these issues.
The course structure will be modular, allowing the schools to include it easily and flexibly in their own curricula, ensuring the interdisciplinary approach demanded by the topics covered.
Each module will be presented in an innovative and stimulating manner, describing the topics covered, the problems and criticalities faced, the learning outcomes, the knowledge and skills to be obtained, and will be developed by producing teaching materials and materials for the workshops and learning assessments required for the teaching activities (IO2 and IO3).
Development of teaching materials
The objective is to develop practical, easy-to-use work tools, allowing teachers to deliver active, workshop-based teaching following the principles of Active Learning, offering ample time during the lessons for the active participation of the students, direct experience, workshops and group work. Each learning unit will also have a strong focus on problem solving, aiming to present students concrete, real-world challenges and encourage them to identify problems and innovative solutions.
The aim is not to reproduce any existing materials but rather to exploit them, integrating external resources into the internal ones.
Development of materials for the workshops and for skills assessment
Each learning unit includes key workshop activities. The output is therefore finalised mainly for the development of exercises and activities to be assigned to the students at the end of the workshops. The students will learn better when engaged in group activities that place them intellectually in the real world. Some of the special aims of the workshop activities are:
• to build, rather than reproduce, knowledge;
• to stimulate and support reflective practices;
• to foster the construction of knowledge through cooperation.
The objective is to develop practical, easy-to-use tools allowing students to “learn by doing” and consolidate the lesson topics in class, continuously experimenting practical activities.
Online platform
The platform, connected to the project website, will make all the modules available on-demand and they will therefore be easily accessible to all the partner schools and may also be used by other schools and generally, anyone interested in the topics covered.
The course materials made available in this way will ensure active learning. The course is not in fact designed for conventional classroom teaching, but to be delivered leaving space for self-learning and cooperative methods in which the learners play an active role as well as peer learning situations.
Direct Target Group
High School Students (14-19 years).
Indirect Target Group
teacher educators, other schools, headteachers, librarians, school leaders, researchers, policymakers, professionals working in school education, in-house experts