The Writing's on the Wall: Helping students combat climate change through journalism, activism and art

The two partners devised this project in response to a shared concern around the lack of resources and limited strategies for teachers and schools across Europe to effectively integrate climate change education into their teaching. Our aim was to produce a series of stimulating, cross-curricular teaching resources to build students' understanding of the facts of climate change and to encourage them to respond creatively using journalism, activism and art. In so doing, we have sought to address both the needs of teachers who wish to engage in climate teaching but lack resources, institutional support and knowledge to do so, and the needs of young people for whom the climate crisis ranks as one of their primary concerns but who feel both under-informed and disempowered to take action.

In broad terms, the project aimed to meet the needs of teachers and young people described above by generating tools, techniques and resources for teaching climate change and promoting them to as wide an audience as possible. We set three specific objectives in our application: firstly, to offer schools a focus for their climate change awareness and teaching; secondly, to improve understanding of the facts about climate change and to enable schools to respond creatively using journalism, activism and art and, finally, to provide students and educators with live, web-based, transnational opportunities to deepen their knowledge of the climate crisis and to develop key skills. The extent to which these objectives were realised is discussed below. Beyond these aims, the partners also anticipated the project would contribute to several organisational goals. For News Decoder, this included audience growth particular in the climate education domain and generation of new interest in their other programming. For Climate Academy, aims included profile-raising as it established itself as an independent NGO, increased audiences and a larger platform for its climate education advocacy work. How far these aims were achieved in discussed below.

Of the six planned activities, three were implemented in full and three were implemented in part. Activities 1 (creation of project guidance resources and accompanying teaching and learning materials), 4 (open access student journalism prize including marketing/promotion and outreach) and 5 (series of webinars convening young people and experts) were implemented in full and as planned with concrete outputs as detailed in the next section. Activity 2 (outreach to and recruitment of participating schools) was implemented successfully to the extent that 109 schools were contacted and a total of 53 schools participated in at least one activity. However the partners did not carry out the webinar-based training workshops anticipated as part of this activity for reasons discussed below. Activity 3 (mentoring of participating students and production, editing and management of webspace) was carried out as planned but not on the scale anticipated due to the lower-than-anticipated responsiveness by the schools. Finally, activity 6 (series of professional development workshops for educators) was not implemented, however the partners did undertake some professional development activities with teachers as described in more detail below.

OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES CREATED: 5 explainer videos to accompany the Climate Academy’s core textbook; Climate Journalism Shorts (3 short videos with tips for young climate reporters) plus additional resources and further reading suggestions; 15 Climate Decoder articles written by professional journalists explaining issues such as the food system, loss and damage reparations etc; recordings of the 6-part webinar series ‘Ecologues’ plus spin-off teaching resources on the same themes. LIVE EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES HELD: 6 live ‘Ecologue’ webinars between January and June 2023, attended by 111 online and 87 in-person participants, with a total of 483 registrations. The recordings were afterwards viewed by almost 1700 people up until August 2023. Young people were invited to submit entries to the Climate Champions storytelling competition, receiving 37 entrants from 16 countries in 4 continents, and the 7 winners were announced and published from April. OUTREACH AND COMMUNICATION A total of 109 schools were directly contacted and 53 actively participated. We produced 9 editions of a monthly newsletter which was sent to 194 contacts and undertook regular social media communication to a total audience of over 3,700.