At a time when students around the world are skipping school to raise awareness of the climate change emergency and demonstrate to ensure concrete action for our planet and its future, educators must make education a central and more visible part of the international response to climate change and ensure its effective implementation.
EDUCATION IS CENTRAL TO SHAPE THE WAY WE ADDRESS CHALLENGES CLIMATE CHANGE POSES.
Responding to climate change today encompasses two things:
- Reducing our emissions and stabilizing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (we call this climate change
‘mitigation’); - Adjusting to the actual and expected climate (which is referred to as ‘adaptation’).
To achieve this, a range of instruments – policy regulation, economic incentives and technology – are needed, but this will
only work if people understand what climate change is and how to deal with it. So we need to change the way people think
and act to change minds, not the climate, and education is essential to achieve the radical change required.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL LITERACY
In recent years, several initiatives have been launched to address climate change. These include 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which the UN has been promoting since 2012. One of them, number 13, is titled “Climate
Action.”
The success of these initiatives depends largely on environmental awareness campaigns for populations, who are often unaware of these important political agreements, and the development of a culture of climate awareness. Environmental education is about educating citizens and informing them about the causes and consequences of climate change.
MICROLEARNING IS PARTICULARLY EFFECTIVE IN TRAINING YOUTH
There are certain advantages of the microlearning that bring a brand new quality to the learning provess of the youth studying at VET schools that our project wants to exploit:
(1) Increases engagement: The different types of media used attract and hold the learner’s attention. This helps learners
stay engaged for longer. Small chunks of exciting content also help learners stay focused on one topic at a time. All without
becoming distracted or bored by unnecessary repetition.
(2) Promotes peer-to-peer learning: Information is generally much easier to share with other people when it is presented in
an online format. Through this, microlearning promotes peer-to-peer learning, allows learners to consume content quickly
and easily. Students can engage with course content anywhere and at any time they like, at their own pace. Modules on
different platforms make it even easier for learners to consume information.
(3) Improves knowledge retention: Microlearning reinforces its source material by giving learners enough time to absorb and understand new knowledge.
Our project intends to develop the above mentioned principles into a set of handy tools for environmental education, considering the needs of VET trainers and students.
TANGIBLE OUTPUTS
- Virtual library
- Set of GreenComp micro-lessons
- VET Teachers’ Guide – a step-by-step guide on how to use the GreenComp micro-lessons
- GreenComp micro-certificate
- Green competence training platform
Asociația pentru Sprijinirea Inițiativelor Educaționale 