The Climate Goals and Content in Education project was conceived in 2021, launched a year later and completed this year. It continues to evolve in our minds and our daily actions, including at work. More than a hundred external collaborators, experts and trusted partners have been involved in the creation of the products. I want to thank each and every one of them publicly.
We have organised a number of short online training sessions titled ABCs of Environmental Learning, an educational programme titled The Alpine School and a more extended programme titled The Basics of Climate Education for Adults, including an extensive testing of a new method of learning – citizen science. You can read more about this in the article in both English and Slovenian. We have also reported on these developments in e-News. We attended the Educational Research Institute conference and published a paper (in Slovenian) in the publication on pages 62–63.
We have published them on the Signs of Sustainability (in Slovenian Znamenja trajnosti) website. A publication with the same title has been updated and reprinted.
The second book is titled Fragile Balances (in Slovenian Krhka ravnotežja) and is aimed at an audience that has hitherto been unknown.
The Climate Goals and Content in Education project has enabled us to build on our existing green education practice, which we are particularly pleased about. The SIAE experts had to analyse the practice and, therefore, think particularly carefully about the criteria for it. We compared them with a number of international implementations that have been emerging in recent years. We found that there has been no systemic concern for green practices, that some of the study circles can be called good practices in green education and that the response to our call for proposals allowed the selection of seven study circles that continued to enhance their work until September this year.
Congratulations to all seven institutions for their response to climate change and for learning the skill of publishing a professional text in a professional journal. Next year, among other things, you will also be able to read about adult environmental education practices in the international scientific journal Studies in Adult Education and Learning.
The large-scale project, funded by the Ministry of Environment, Spatial Planning and Energy through the Climate Change Fund, was a tremendous opportunity and challenge. We believe we have completed it responsibly.
We hope and aspire that due to this project, some decisions and actions subsequently taken have been altered. If you gave up your plane ticket and endured, accepted or even enjoyed other, less environmentally burdensome transport, all the better. After all, transportation stands as one of the key environmental challenges in Europe and Slovenia. The circulation of water in the form of storms is already having a devastating impact on our backyards. Responsible institutions are working to limit greenhouse gas emissions and to green not only their surroundings but their operations in general.
We are all learning together that the response is therefore not just individual, nor just institutional, but even more complex, as it is systemic. Even small steps are a significant contribution to nurturing our environmentally sensitive culture, which we are actually learning again in our predominantly urban lifestyle. Like some others, we do not have to relearn language and dialects, even if the names of glaciers are sinking into oblivion because, at least as educators, we no longer live solely from mown hillsides and plains. Therefore, climate objectives in education are still relevant after the conclusion of the project, in which all national public institutions participated. The above is only a rough overview of what has been done, so we will keep you informed about the individual results, lessons learned and impacts of the soon-to-be-completed project.
Dr Nevenka Bogataj (nevenka.bogataj@acs.si), SIAE
