Conference Program

"Che clima che fa..." is an educational project focused on climate change, involving some 20 teachers and 150 students (primary and lower secondary) in three schools situated in the Venice Lagoon area, belonging to the national school network Rete di Dialogues for Futures (retedialogues.it).The project aims to engage participants both cognitively and emotionally, transforming students into "proactive researchers" through learning paths that acquire and share awareness of the climate crisis and potential solutions. Different aspects of the Venice Lagoon are explored to discover how they change, and how this can be documented with communication technologies. Learning environments are created where schools act as bridges between experts and local communities.

Moving beyond a strictly scientific approach, “Che clima che fa” tackles the often-neglected social, cultural, and emotional dimensions of climate change. It seeks to devise activities which allow to better understand how eco-anxiety and the feelings of helplessness or discomfort young people often face operate and can be prevented.

The main goals of the project are the development of:

- awareness on how young students experience climate change and how they can position themselves in a constructive way.

- teaching tools to integrate climate education into the curriculum

- strategies that enhance students’ agency in becoming global citizens and taking active, informed roles in their communities

- experiences that make students authors of messages to their community

- initiatives to engage families and the local territory and create a widespread "educational ecosystem."

Three integrated learning approaches are adopted:

- Place-Based Education (PBE) that emphasizes the connection between learning and the specific physical location where students and teachers live. Here students are engaged cognitively, emotionally, and physically by using their local community and environment (in this case, the lagoon area) as a "living laboratory." Students become proactive researchers of their own local culture and ecology, applying abstract scientific concepts to real-world local challenges.

- Trialogical Learning Approach (TLA) a Finnish approach assuming that learning is most effective when students work together to build something useful that has impact beyond the classroom. Here learning involves interactions between teachers, students, and a "shared object" (product). In the project, students and teachers work with experts to create multimedia messages to share with peers and the community, illustrating their scientific findings and laboratory experiences in the Lagoon.

- Action Research, an operational perspective where teaching is combined with ongoing observation and the use self-reflective tools by teachers and students. By reflecting on the dynamics of the learning process as it happens, educators can develop new tools and strategies to improve. Meanwhile new knowledge is made available for practitioners and researchers on how things occur in a challenging context such as that of environmental education and climate change education.

Within the framework described above the case study explores the actions enacted and sheds light on the processes elicited, on teachers and students’ reactions and feelings from the field. Hints are offered for research developments and replications.