Slowly summertime has arrived in each corner of Europe. And although that means that most education institutions are (still) closed or are only just coming back into the new school year that promises to be as hectic as the last ones, it doesn’t mean that the people engaged or working in them are equally resting. (Nevertheless, we hope that you will find or have found some time for you to disconnect from all learning and working pace to relax and find back energy!)
Like most of you that are already preparing – or at least thinking about – the new school year ahead, we are currently reflecting about the insight sprint we had with all of you in the different workshops we held in July. From community outreach and communication, over organising community knowledge to identifying and working through participatory community challenges: we could not be more grateful for all your input and critical engagement. This is what makes a community a community!
25th November 2021
Mark your calendars! Why?
This is the date of the first Education for Climate Day where our collaborative community platform will be launched. What will happen on this day in addition? Stay tuned and check back regularly.
November 25th is the official date we are working towards by embedding your community reflections.
Co-design roadmap
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Community management and guidelines: how do we make sure & facilitate that the community is a safe and trusted place for all?
Check the workshops on shaping community dynamics if this question speaks to you
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Community leadership: how do we take decisions together, including institutional and other stakeholders?
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Community content co-validation: what processes, mechanisms and structures are needed for a peer relevant and scientifically sound community content validation system?
Follow the community validation and certification mechanism workshops if this topic is dear to you
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The online community: how do we want to facilitate online engagement? What role for ambassadors and national Coalitions?
Be part of the ‘building the online community’ workshops to explore these questions with us
Working towards 25th November also means that we want to test the collaborative platform with you beforehand. After a short community workshop break that we will use to polish the platform, we will resume at the end of October to get your feedback on it. It’s your platform to interact on, so it needs to correspond to your needs to make concrete education for climate actions happen together.
More community action on the horizon
This autumn, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) is taking place in Glasgow (31.10. - 12.11.2021). Beforehand, the ‘Youth4Climate’ pre-COP event is happening in Milan (28-30.09.2021).
Both have the same global aspiration: uniting the world to tackle climate change and accelerate concrete actions towards environmental sustainability (the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change).
We want to channel our community efforts and concrete ideas for participatory challenges into this process.
Stay tuned for participation opportunities to be announced!
For now, enjoy summer - we will be back with the next Education for Climate community bulletin on 03.09.21.
Takeaways of the previous workshop
Between the last community bulletin and this current one, only one additional workshop took place. This time, the summary will be a bit shorter.
What did we want to learn about?
In the previous discussions on identifying and working through community challenges, we learnt that ‘selecting, ‘filtering’, or ‘choosing’ were not the right words to describe our intended participatory process since they gave an exclusionary impression. Therefore, for the second iteration of this conversation, we slightly adapted our guiding questions to reflect this.
How do we work through community challenges?
How do we converge from the many conversations, suggestions, and contributions around and for education for climate action on the platform to some qualitative challenges that bring the community together for concrete and ambitious actions on the ground?
What did we find out?
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Challenge funnels: ‘organized diversity’ and operational commitment?
Discussions centered on ideas to have participatory challenges by Education 4 Climate priorities, type of user categories (students, teachers, stakeholders, etc.) or content resources ( activities, materials, policy guidelines, etc.). In additional, participatory challenges shall always have ‘committed challenge leaders/ managers’: the ones who have introduced the question/ action/ solution on the platform and who are willing to steer, manage and organize the specific challenge working procedures together with potential ‘co-sponsors’ and their challenge community (the users that would like to be part of the ideation & implementation/action co-working process).
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Challenge languages:
although the main platform language will be English, having spaces where local languages can be used is essential. One idea that came up was that whereas the ‘main umbrella challenge’ could be in English, its sub-challenges – how to make the challenge work in a very specific local country context – could be worked on in the respective languages. So essentially, the same challenge could take place at the same time, but in different contexts and languages – and eventually all local actions and insights are played back into the umbrella challenge: in English. Unity in diversity in education for climate action.
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Challenge incentives: How to make challenges attractive to participate in?
By making them timely and relevant to the ‘multiple localities’’ climate catastrophe contexts. We converged on the need to showcase and highlight a few corresponding events, challenges, and conversations centrally on the platform to have an immediate participation springboard for platform visitors.
What are the next steps?
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As always, we will feed these insights back into our work.
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As outlined above, we have an ambitious workshop spring in front of us in September: so if you want to contribute to the community workings: there are still workshop places left, please register!
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Also, bring your fellows on board - spread the word of our workshop and make it our collective challenge journey to build and refine the community (platform) and make concrete action for environmental sustainability happen!
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Or, reach out to us via: EC-EDUCATION-4-CLIMATE@ec.europa.eu
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