What Vocational Education can do for Climate Action

The project was meant to help VET members and learners understand the impact of environmental challenges and increase 'environmental literacy' of VETs by strengthening the capacity of local commun...

The project was meant to help VET members and learners understand the impact of environmental challenges and increase 'environmental literacy' of VETs by strengthening the capacity of local communities through active environmental education. In addition to that, the idea behind the VEforCA project was to promote education for change as well as to develop critical active citizen-ship and advocacy for sustainable development. It also pursued the following specific objectives: - Increasing opportunities of VETs to engage with their communities in environmental and climate actions while enhancing their ability to think critically; - Developing an open e-learning programme for VET educators empowering them to support community engagement for the environment; - Developing a set of resources to increase and measure eco-consciousness among VETs; - Encouraging a shared decision-making process and co-design of environmental policy initiatives by applying a multi-stakeholder approach; - Ensuring wide and sustainable access to the project results among VET learners, educators, CSOs, and policy-makers.

The activities implemented in the project included: • Participatory field-study research, complementing a desk-based research on citizen science ap-proaches, environmental challenges and actions, which was prepared in a form of an interactive report (constituting Result 1 of the project); • Development of e-learning programme (constituting Result 2 of the project) empowering VET educators to promote community-based environmental action; • Delivery of a pilot environmental awareness-action with VET learners with the newly-created Sus-tainability kit, and of the eco-consciousness assessment package (R3 and R4 respectively);

During the course of the project’s implementation, the following concrete outputs and results were created: - R1 - Interactive report: citizen science approaches, environmental challenges and climate action; - R2 - E-learning programme; - R3 - Sustainability kit: 6 fields to make a difference every day; - R4 - Eco-consciousness assessment package; The developed pedagogical resources empower VET educators to connect learners with the envi-ronmental challenges, and contribute to change in attitudes by leading them towards more sustain-able habits. The created project results are available in three language versions: English, Polish and Italian.