Go Green! Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Environmental Sustainability at School

<< Background >>The starting point and main motivation of the GoGreen! Consortium was the shared belief among the involved schools of their duty to educate new generations to an integrated and sustainable vision of economic development and to motivate new generations to better understand the impact of their behaviours by making them more aware of the consequences that their actions could have on the future.To achieve this ambitious aim the schools, sharing the idea with the experts decided to explore and answer to the students need to learn to face complexity as if every choice can produce different and multifaceted effects the picture can be understood only through a journey, the GOGreen! Actors identified and called “trans-disciplinarity”.Within the context, the following pressing needs were selected as most relevant:-Cover teachers knowledge and methodological gaps that make them not sufficiently prepared to address the issue-Explore the use of transdisciplinary based validated teaching tools on the theme of sustainability development-Build a syllabus to transversally introduce sustainability topics in schools curricular activities << Objectives >>GENERAL AIMIn order to effectively answer to the motivation and to the needs identified the GoGreen! Project aimed at redefining disciplinary programs and educational methods in order to contribute to promoting the awareness of schools communities about environmental issues and sustainable development through the promotion of a transdisciplinary approaches and problem-based learning.SPECIFIC OBJECTIVESTo pursue its aims the consortium identified and defined the the following specific objectives:SO 1: Training secondary school teachers of all subjects to make them able to insert environmental issues in their teaching practice and be protagonists of the implementation of an effective transdisciplinary approach in addressing environmental issues at school.SO 2: Providing secondary school teachers with Lesson Plans based on a transdisciplinary approach and problem-based learning teaching tools taking the form of fully scientifically reliable yet easily implementable in-class activities.SO 3: Developing a Pilot Syllabus for teaching Environmental Sustainability at school according to the fruitful combination of transdisciplinary and problem-based learning approaches.<< Implementation >>GoGreen! promoted a cooperative effort among secondary school teachers and leaders, academics experts in the field of scientific and environmental issues and in the use of problem-based learning in implementing the following key activities:Developing testing and assessing a complete online training course addressed to secondary school teachers of both humanistic and scientific areas to prepare them in taking into account environmental and sustainable development-related issue in their lessons (WP 2)Creating and piloting a collection of lesson plans addressing environmental and sustainable development issues according to problem-based learning and interdisciplinary concepts defined through the cooperation between teachers and academics (WP 3)Building a Transnational based Pilot Syllabus specifically designed for students in the first two years of upper secondary school and aiming to provide them with the knowledge, skills and competences to take an active role in Sustainable Development (WP 4)Developing and implementing an effective Valorisation and Communication strategy to disseminate and exploit the GoGreen! project outputs and results and create the conditions for their full sustainability in time (WP 5)<< Results >>Concrete outputs are:- E-learning course for secondary school teachers focusing on environmental and sustainable development topics, using a transdisciplinary approach to ensure a broad and integrated perspective to the themes: https://go-green.pixel-online.org/e-learning.php- Collection of scientifically validated yet highly usable Lesson Plans each exploring in full the transdisciplinary and macro-dimensions (e.g., economic, sociological, scientific, etc.) of key environmental and sustainability challenges to solve them https://go-green.pixel-online.org/lesson_plan.php - Transnational Pilot Syllabus focusing on sustainable development themes to be used by secondary schools to support students learning process and their application of the combination of sectoral and global knowledge to increase their competence in analyzing and solving tasks and problems according to multidimensional thinking: https://go-green.pixel-online.org/syllabus.php Main result is 60 school teachers, 2 school leaders overseeing internal workgroups within partner schools, 18 expert educators and 800 students benefiting from the project as being involved in the creation, testing and mainstreaming of the outputs