Just Action! Teachers and students for a sustainable transition

Schools: Our research among schools suggested that teachers in some partner countries had limited resources and capacity to deliver global citizenship education (GCE) to their students. Furthermore, teachers felt unsupported to take climate action in their schools, even though they feel a greater pressure to be more sustainable in schools. National: An analysis of national policies suggested a disconnect in most partner countries between governments intention to create more sustainable schools and the action that teachers percieved to be takig places. Furthermore, GCE is increasingly present in national curricula, and teachers need access to relevant training and resources to deliver these. Individual: From an initial phase of research with teachers, we found they had very little time to upskill in GCE and some reported having very few resources that they could easily accesss. More experienced teachers wanted some material that they could give to less-experienced teachers, and then collaborate on projects between classes. Organisational: GAP Ireland had developed these secondary resources but had nothing similar for primary level. Other partner organisations were working in this sphere but without signature resources.

We wanted to increase the ability of teachers to take climate action in their schools. Our theory of change holds that, if students are informed and care about the threats to human rights presented by climate change, then they are more likely to engage in projects to create more sustainable schools and communities. However, we know that not every teacher is experienced in speaking about human rights or climate change; we also know that they are experts in their own field and areas of interest. Therefore we tried to create resources that supported teachers of all levels of experience and interest to drive local, collective, student-led action.

Our Design Thinking course established the basic structure of the project. Following the 'Double Diamond' approach to user-centred design, we went through the following project phases: - Discover: Through speaking with a core group of teachers in each country we learned the challenges they face. We also did extensive desk review of existing resources to see what already existed and establish best practice principles. We also reviewed the national curricula in partner countries to understand where our project contributed to it. - Define: We aggregated the information to define the problem as teacher understood it. We decided to focus on the issue of colleague support, as well as limited teacher preperation time. - Develop Prototype: We created initial prototypes of the project results and shared them with our core teachers at the LTTA event in Oslo. They gave us some invaluable feedback on how they would practically deliver these activities, issues as they saw them for their classrooms, course structure and other items. - Deliver: We created the rest of the resources using the insights and feedback from the previous phases. - Pilot: Core teachers and others piloted our resources and gave us feedback on them, which we quickly implemented. A further activity was the visit during the second Transnational meeting to a school in Granada where we documented the impact of the project on students and recorded insights into their learning experiences under Just Action; this then contributed to the development of PR 3. - Dissemination: The final months of the project were spent promoting the project results.

The planned, concrete outputs included: PR 1 - Secondary Students' Journey - 47 activities arranged on a map by theme and increasing spheres of influence. Activities are keyed to national curricula in partner countries for children aged 11-15. PR 2 - Primary Students Journey - 39 activities arranged on a map by theme and increasing spheres of influence. Activities are keyed to national curricula in partner countries for children aged 8-11. PR 3 - Teacher's Journey - A self-guided teacher training course containing videos, podcasts, articles and reflective activities. PR4 - A website that contains PRs 1 - 3. Based on feedback from the evaluators at the outset of the project and that of teachers during our research phase, it was decided to focuse our resources on upper-primary and lower secondary; the ages of these cohorts differ slightly between partner countries so we resolved to focus on the ages of 8-11 and 11-15 respectively. The intention was that teachers could develop the resources downwards for younger children and upwards for older children. Additional results of the project included: - Increased transmission and learning between teachers involved in the project. For example, a Spanish teacher working in a pilot school returned to Norway after the LTTA to better learn about Education for Sustainable Development in Norway and to better see how they were implementing the project there. There were additional exchanges between Spanish and Italian and Italian and Irish teachers involved in the project. - A further unexpected result is the development of the Just Maps project, currently funded by the Spanish National Agency. This arose as our work on Just Action discovered an unmet need for schools to better connect with community action in their local communities. Just Action touches on this topic but Just Maps will engage with it more comprehensively.