Sustainable Ecosystem for Climate Education

The Polish education system has not sufficiently addressed climate change education in its core curriculum so far. Despite according requests from academia and civil society, systemic change is happening only slowly. Quality climate change education is indispensable, however, to ensure that youths are aware of their options to fight climate change.

Climate Education Lessons; Photo: © Grzegorz Jóźwiak, Forum for Civic Initiatives Foundation

As the core curriculum was unlikely to change easily, the project team focused on local authorities instead and motivated schools to incorporate climate change into their teaching and provided respective training to teachers. The project created a model of extracurricular climate education that was tested in eight schools across Lower Silesia. The model involved teachers, principals, municipalities, businesses, and NGOs from Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Importantly, including them into the extracurricular activities fostered their overall commitment to the topic: together, they constituted an ecosystem of support that encouraged and institutionalised climate change education at schools. Additionally, the project team developed a digital platform that allowed the sharing of experience, knowledge, and training and education material. Once proven successful, the project team prepared the model as a ready-to-use solution for schools in other Polish regions, enabling the generation to come to take the bold climate action needed.

• As part of the program, students from each school studied the local area, identified the needs of residents and chose the project topic that was closest to them. Worth noting is the project prepared by students from the School and Kindergarten Complex from Lewin Klodzki, who implemented an event under the slogan "Life in zero waste-it's easy," which had the goal of reducing the amount of waste and improving its segregation and reuse in the nearest environment of the participants. As part of this action, the creation of a mobile recycling garden was initiated (thanks to the cooperation of parents and allotment gardeners), organization of a flea market - giving items a second life (involving residents and parents). This event is now part of the annual agenda and involves the whole town community.
• All school projects were presented at the closing conference in Wrocław. During the final conference workshop, teachers and students worked on how this method could be introduced as part of the core curriculum. The workshop was attended by representatives of the Board of Education, the institution that regionally exercises substantive supervision over schools, and they too confirmed their desire for further cooperation.
• One of the objectives of the project was the creation and implementation of the digital Climate Expert Online Platform (CEOP) tool. The goal of the CEOP platform is to create a network that connects people involved in climate education in schools, kindergartens, and universities, as well as supporting individuals and institutions (local governments, foundations, entrepreneurs). In the next step, substantive content was prepared for the platform (webinars and podcast) to be used by the platform users. To meet the digital needs of users it was possible to prepare materials in the form of professional webinars. All materials are now available on the platform.
• Video: Workshop for teachers. New model of climate education Szczawno-Zdrój November 2022