Educators
Education has a key role to play in tackling global goals and climate challenges on a global scale, and teachers are at the heart of education’s response. The global insights gathered from the Teaching for Climate Action initiative innate this initiative, designed by national education networks and experts. Connect students to an inspiring video and steps they can take at the state national and Global level to inform politicians and support in marketing the SDG’s to School Principals, Educators, academicians and University Presidents.
The 17 SDG’s are rich, complex and multifaceted. Teaching for climate action demands that young people develop a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of climate change, consider climate matters from multiple angles, and feel empowered to transform their communities and society at large. It calls on the collective response of all teachers, no matter their subject area expertise and grade levels taught, to teach for climate, to consider refining and shifting current pedagogical practices and to leverage professional collaboration to enhance their practice and impact.
Furthermore, it urges school and higher education leaders and the wider education community to consider how their resources can best be used to support educators to teach for climate action and empower all students. And while the insights testify to the important role of climate education in the global climate crisis, it also shows the many challenges in existing attempts limiting its full transformative potential from being realized across all our schools universities and education systems.
Fostering student agency and empowerment for action Climate education has often been associated with climate literacy. Teachers and experts emphasised the importance of cultivating climate literacy as a foundational and critical requirement of climate education. Climate literacy is seen as necessary to help students to:
- Develop a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change
- Know how to assess scientifically credible information about climate change
- Communicate about climate issues in a meaningful way to peers, teachers and parents
- Make informed and responsible decisions with regards to actions that are related to climate
However, in line with the research showing that while climate literacy is crucial, building knowledge alone is not enough to promote action there was common agreement among teachers on the need to go beyond climate literacy to foster student awareness, agency and empowerment for climate action.
Children are watching what adults do and how they cooperate with nature. These children will grow up in a few years and be our future. Each and every one of us will make a decision as to whether or not we will join forces to work together. The idea behind climate change education is to raise children who are confident that they can collaborate with various people, who are willing to work with nature as something close to them.
Empowerment is the transfer of knowledge, information, and skills through formal and non-formal education from one generation to another so that the learner can gain the strength, ability, and control to tackle life challenges, socially, economically, and politically. Empowering students means that teachers can help their students become more aware of their environment, by building their confidence, and giving them a voice to address issues in their communities and global space.
When it comes to empowering students, we as educators, have to be the enablers (..) we need to inform every student of the different avenues for them to take action and apply their learning actively to the climate context. This way, we can change student minds and behaviors.
To empower students there are three essential things: First, children do need to know the reality. You can’t sugar-coat what’s actually happening. Children need to understand the basic science of climate change and how it’s affecting the Earth’s weather patterns globally and locally. Second, children need to understand that there are solutions and there are many people working on finding these solutions. Fostering hope for the future is important. And finally, children need to know how they can specifically become part of those solutions. It’s important to communicate how all students can take part in existing initiatives or develop new solutions.
Youth survey: learning experiences and youth vision on climate change education
Purpose
UNESCO is leading the global efforts together with partners and stakeholders to promote transformative education to tackle the planetary crisis, through the new global framework for the period 2020-2030, entitled “Education for Sustainable Development: towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals” (ESD for 2030), with the main goal of ensuring all learners acquire knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes to tackle climate change.
To ensure climate action is part of the curriculum in every country, UNESCO is developing a green curriculum guideline to help integrate climate education into every schools. This guideline is to be co-developed with young people from 12 to 25 years old and reflect the needs and demands of youth-related to climate change education. We want to know about the content you learn, your experience and environment at school as well as understand the collaboration between your school and the community on climate change education.
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