The Project
According to UNESCO, education is a key factor of the global response to climate change because it can increase knowledge, enable informed decision-making and encourage behavioural changes for adopting sustainable lifestyles; in this regard, a teacher’s role in developing climate change awareness is crucial. The threat of climate change and the ongoing pandemic have highlighted the need for the digital transformation of education. The European Commission maintains that teachers need to develop solid digital literacy skills in both creating digital education content as well as in digital teaching methods. In climate change education, teachers face a number of barriers: some of them are related to the multidisciplinary nature of climate change or students’ misconceptions, but arguably the most important barriers stem from the lack in teacher training for developing the necessary skills when delivering instruction for climate change.
The 24-month Erasmus+ project entitled “Towards a new model of Teachers’ Professional Competence Development on Climate Change” (Acronym: ClimaTePD), offers a solution to this problem: its overall goal is to help in-service secondary teachers in developing digital literacy and climate change teaching skills as means for enabling their students to build awareness about the global threat of climate change.
Project Partners
ClimaTePD Consortium consists of five partners:
Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas Coordinator
Universitat de Barcelona Partner
Friedrich-Alexander-Universitaet Erlangen Nuernberg Partner
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski Partner
Hacettepe Universitesi (HU) Partner
FORTH has extensive experience in EU funded projects, both as coordinator and as partner, and holds a broad expertise in various areas of educational methodologies and social innovation, with a particular focus on the dimension of school education and ICT as a tool for enhancing learning practices.
SU, UB and HU have strong pedagogical backgrounds and expertise in teachers’ training focussing on STEMM oriented inquiry-based learning (IBL) and technology-enhanced learning (TEL).
ILI-FAU has extensive experience in promoting innovation in digital learning environments and pedagogical approaches such as IBL, problem-based learning (PBL) and game-based learning (GBL) in all educational levels.
Project objectives
ClimaTePD aims at helping in-service secondary teachers in developing digital literacy and climate change teaching skills as means for enabling their students to build awareness about the global threat of climate change. In meeting its objective, ClimaTePD proceeds to the development of synchronous and asynchronous training workshops, as well as the design of digital training scenarios that will guide teachers in developing their own activities in online, face-to-face or blended classroom environments.
- Development of an open access online platform for in-service teachers’ training
The platform is designed to support:
- in-service teachers in secondary education to participate in the training activities to improve their teaching digital skills,
- training’s learning activities based on digital scenarios and other educational strategies,
- teachers reflecting on their practice and tutors monitoring via a learning analytics dashboard,
- monitoring teachers’ activities and providing feedback and
- in-service teachers to exchange good practices in the learning digital portal in the online platform.
- Development of a Guideline Handbook for teachers' good practices on climate change education (leading organisation: HU)
- The Guideline Handbook aims at reviewing best practices on climate change topic and providing support to teachers for successfully integrating it in their classrooms. The Handbook also provides guidelines in order to facilitate teachers’ participation in TPD training.
- Development of a digital repository on climate change education consisting of digital scenarios and other educational activities and resources (leading organisation: FAU)
- Secondary education in-service teachers exchange good practices in a repository embedded in the proposed project’s online platform.
- Development of a set of policy proposals related to policy and curricula design (leading organisation: UB)
- Policy proposals are developed for educational policy makers and other relevant stakeholders towards the embedment of the dimension of climate change topic in teaching learning practices and applied didactics in secondary education.
Project Phases
The project is divided into 4 phases:
- Preparation: investigating, analysing and mapping the state of affairs regarding the dimensions of climate change education and digital skills into secondary teachers professional development schemes (TPD)
- Development: developing the project’s learning material in the context of secondary teachers’ training activities via IBL and gamification principles for their TPD on climate change education and digital teaching methods
- Deployment and Evaluation: implementation and the evaluation of the project’s training activities for climate change education and digital skills via IBL and gamification, with the participation of 250 in-service teachers
- Exploitation and Dissemination: organisation of events in each one of the consortium countries in order to facilitate the visibility of the project and the circulation of the project outcomes.
Project Impact
ClimaTePD foresees to have an impact on the design of educational policies, Teachers Professional Development schemes and curricula in secondary education. More specifically, ClimaTePD is expected to improve the effectiveness of teaching approaches and methods for climate change in secondary education at both local and national levels. At the EU level, the project is aligned with key priorities of the ERASMUS+ programme, including environmental and climate goals and as such it has the potential to contribute to wider targets such as to strengthen the profiles of the teaching professions by propagating technology enhanced inquiry learning