Climate Labs: Inspiring Teachers and Empowering Students

What can one do for the future of our planet? How can we, as a society, fix a challenge as complex and multifaceted as climate change while ensuring a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future for all??

These questions, vital to the democratic debate in our societies around the globe, will need to be answered through various perspectives and approaches during the years and decades to come. In particular, students, who are currently completing their educational pathway when the global mean temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels (WMO, 2021), will play a crucial role in modeling a livable future for all.

Only, how exactly can we involve them in climate action and citizen engagement initiatives? How do we make students aware of their agency and responsibility within this complex context, filled with uncertainty and complex processes? Among the many potential answers is climate change education. Recently, the international community has unanimously started to recognize the crucial role of education in preparing future generations for the multifaceted and complex challenges that await them. Climate change education does not only raise students' awareness; it genuinely helps them "understand and address the impacts of the climate crisis, empowering them with the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes needed to act as agents of change" (UNESCO, n.d.).

This inspiring and innovative educational context paves the way for new initiatives and ideas. Among them is Climate Labs, a project that sought to involve not only students, but also teachers and other relevant stakeholders and organizations active in the education system. More specifically, this 5-week programme empowered secondary school teachers in Berlin, Germany to integrate climate-related, cross-curricular, and innovative methodological and didactic contents into their classrooms, further enabling the latter to apply their freshly acquired knowledge with their respective students in a Young Climathon.?

Developed by 2811, financed by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union, and supported by Climate KIC , the initiative is taking root to revolutionize how students learn, and educators teach about climate challenges, ultimately enabling both to take concrete action in and outside their classrooms. However, to fulfill this wide potential, the project needed to be broken down into multiple steps.

Climate Action Academy

The project's first milestone was a 4-weeks training, entitled Climate Action Academy, meticulously designed for teachers and educators in Berlin. From 29 September to 10 October 2023, educators started their transformative and collaborative journey through four online learning modules, accompanied by experts in the field, focused on the nexus of climate change and socio-ecological challenges.?

Whereas the learning content offered a panel of innovative methodologies and tools that can be integrated into the classroom in a cross-curricular way, such as design thinking and challenge-based learning (CBL), the live sessions provided an overview of the main climate impacts, causes and consequences in Berlin, as well as its unique education landscape and opportunities for climate action.?

"I gained a much broader knowledge of the existing problems and learned from relevant players in this context", summarized one of the teachers who participated in the project."

Learn more about Climate Labs or register for its next version here.?

To measure the output(s) and impact of the program, participants were asked to fill out a survey at the beginning, and one at the end of the training program focused on an accurate evaluation of the content, tools, and methodologies offered by Climate Labs, as well as its dynamic and approach. As displayed in the following figure, most participants showed a substantial increase in confidence in teaching topics related to climate change in their classrooms.?

In reality, the impact of Climate Labs goes far beyond the classroom. Whereas the training activities counted 22 participants, the indirect effect, with teachers impacting their students, colleagues, and other educational stakeholders in the Berlin educational landscape, is much higher.?

"The presentation of various tools broadened my practical teaching horizons", commented another teacher who participated in the program. "Concrete ideas for implementation in schools, networking with other colleagues significantly increased, and I acquired solid basic knowledge of climate change."

16th November 2023, Young Climathon Berlin

In addition to the training program, the project allowed teachers to try some of the methodologies they acquired in an innovative ideation event entitled Young Climathon. Initially developed by Climate-KIC, these programs are events seeking to bring citizens together to inspire projects and ideas to tackle local climate change challenges.

Combining these two programs enabled to join theory and practice to produce concrete ideas and results, exploring the most potent ways climate change education can impact students.?

Thus, on 16 November 2023, 60 secondary students from the Klax Schule and the Wilhelm-von-Siemens Gymnasium joined forces to develop innovative and creative ideas during a 7-hour event. The challenge? Food waste in their schools.

As a reminder: The global food system, from production to consumption, emits around one-third of total annual greenhouse gas emissions – some 18GtCO2e. More specifically, food waste causes approximately half of this. Schools being one of the leading social interaction points in our societies, it was only logical to take the issue of food waste to students, who mastered it fascinatingly.

What’s next?

In a nutshell, Climate Labs is an attempt to bolster the pivotal role of teachers, students, and other educational actors in driving meaningful change locally. However, the program's impacts should not be limited to the participants; instead, they should be open to a wide array of other people.

For this reason, team 2811 developed a toolkit together with the Dutch organization Stichting Technotrend, aiming to provide a structured overview of the Climathon process by showcasing their objectives, outlining their didactic and methodological functioning, and providing examples of best practices and successful projects, namely those carried out in the context of this project.

Ultimately, this Toolkit, primarily targeting teachers, youth workers, school directors, and other formal or informal educators, should enable the latter to understand how to independently organize, manage, and implement a Climathon successfully.

Climate Labs stands as a testament to the power of collaboration, innovation, and collective action in addressing the defining challenge of our time. Would you like to know more? Do you want to participate in this climate education revolution? Please message us at [email protected] and Join us in our mission to cultivate a generation of eco-literate changemakers.