Amazing yesterday presentation from Vanessa Dubois and François Jourde. So a powerful learning methodology to work in a very holistic way with different environmental and STEAM skills with children but also other competencies such as ethics, democracy (they vote for the best solution), cooperation, creativity, empathy, resilience, and much more. I recommend all the teachers of the world use it. Moreover, there is so flexible, adaptable, and open to every teacher's needs and characteristics of their children. Yesterday I share some ideas with the team to work in different ways for example why not invite the children to choose the environmental challenge they would like to face. Maybe their engagement will be reinforced. On the other side, it is so powerful to use the learning "analog" method: the classroom as a kind of world replica. If we try to fix things in our own classroom we will be able to do something similar with continents maybe 10 years later. And of course the impact. A change in children's perception of their own role in the Climate Change arena: they perceive they can do something to contribute to the planet care and see the same in their mates starting a kind of metal snowball effect very far away from the "apocalyptical approach" that sometimes creates so Climate Change anxiety in schools. One million fresh children's ideas are waiting to be developed using this unique way. Stay tuned!
Dear José, thank you very much for your ideas and the input you share.
Your suggestion to let children choose the environmental challenge they want to take on is worth testing to see if it will increase their engagement.
What could be key is the element, I guess, is to find a true driving question, i.e. "a question that triggers curiosity and a sense of purpose to the pupils while at the same time clearly focusing the inquiry to be addressed in the project" (https://academy.schooleducationgateway.eu/web/pbl-key-competences).
As Sir Ken Robinson puts it: "In place of offering answers to questions they haven’t asked, expert teachers provoke questions in students so that they are inspired to explore them" (Robinson & Aronica, Creative schools: The grassroots revolution that's transforming education, 2016)
Dear François, thank you so much for your words, your comment, and the interesting references you provide. You layout a very interesting debate. about the approach to start the process. I am a fan of the complete freestyle open beginning. I mean it could be interesting even not condition the children with any specific question from the teacher's side only mention the topic like what would you like to do to take care the nature? instead of the most recurrent negative, impersonal and a little "grandiose" question "what can we do?" language is key in these ages. And then invite them to choose cooperatively something which all of them love to do (here the feelings and emotions are key). Something that the teacher can also develop much more afterward with more information, inviting somebody interesting to give them a nice input, the diary/blog of the experience, etc. Families can also contribute a lot in this phase complementing teachers' work.
Handling the process in this way can give you some feedback too about key meta-questions such as: how they think about nature, what is "nature" for them (rather than the more abstract concept of the environment"), what kind of things they include in nature? what are their role and position in relation to nature? etc...
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