We are offering a free online course for teachers and non-formal educators as part of the European project ‘CLARITY‘: Transformative Climate Resilience Education for Children and Youth: From Climate Anxiety to Resilience, Creativity , Connection and Regeneration.’ Join the course any time!
Which challenges does the CLARITY project address?
Climate change education in schools and universities tends to focus on environmental facts, whilst little room is given to competences for change and to collective ation. The emotional and mental wellbeing of students, as well as the values, skills and mindsets that are needed for addressing societal challenges and fostering transformation are hardly considered. Consequently, children and youth are increasingly experiencing climate anxiety, associated overwhelm and denial.
CLARITY is a European educational project co-led by Lund University, One Resilient Earth, REAL School Budapest, Climate Creativity, Legacy17, and The Vision Works. The project aims to address these challenges by (1) enhancing educators’ skills for dealing with climate anxiety and nurturing inner resilience of learners, and (2) supporting more integrative approaches that link the inner and outer dimensions of systems change and cultural transformation. For further information about the CLARITY project, please click here.
Who is the teachers and educators online course for?
The massive open online course (MOOC) is for teachers and non-formal educators working with children and young people from 6 to 20+ years old, who are looking for knowledge, tools and methods to teach about climate change with both care and impact. It is self-paced, which means that you can join any time and take the time you need to complete it.
The online course was originally designed for teachers and non-formal educators based in Europe, which informs the content and the methods we offer. However, teachers and educators from other geographies are welcome to join as well, and learn from our approaches, tools and methods in a way that best meet their needs.
What is the online course about?
This online course will enable teachers and educators to better understand why and how they can teach competences that contribute to climate resilience building and regeneration with their students.
Our learning material will also address how those competences can be taught with care and in ways that foster individual, collective and ecosystemic wellbeing.
What will you learn?
Each lesson of the self-paced course will focus on a different competence area defined under the CLARITY Competence framework. More precisely, we will focus on:
- Understanding the need for climate resilience and regeneration
We clarify what climate resilience entails, and why it is critical to pursue transformation and regeneration to build long-term climate resilience, for the benefits of all.
- Navigating climate emotions and climate trauma with students
We address what climate anxiety is, how it manifests in children and youth, as well as why and how it needs to be addressed when teaching. We discuss why the emotional wellbeing and mental health of teachers and educators is paramount, as well as simple exercises you can implement and resources that you can access to restore wellbeing.
- Connecting to oneself, others and nature
We explore why and how integrating activities in nature and with animals helps build critical competences for climate resilience and regeneration. The role of journaling and storytelling in deepening connections is also explained.
- Embracing values that sustain more- than-human lives
We introduce deep-listening techniques and discuss how they are crucial to a sharper understanding of the cultural stories we tell ourselves. The learnign material also focuses on working with Indigenous knowledge holders and their stories.
- Opening up to diverse and regenerative futures
We introduce Futures Literacy and how it can help grow imagination, foster agency and active hope, as well as engage fully with regeneration and transformation. We also highlight the role of the arts in diversifying our representations of the future.
- Taking collective action towards climate resilience and regeneration
We address how to make the most of synergies between inner change and collective action (in schools and in the outer world), for both impact and learning purposes.
- Reflecting about our way forward
We offer an opportunity to take the time to reflect on our learnings, and explore ways forward.
What is encouraged from participants?
Participants are encouraged to dedicate one to two hours per lesson, to make the most of the learning material. For each lesson, the learning material entails:
- A short introduction video of 10 to 15 minutes
- Excerpts of our CLARITY Teacher’s Guide
- Bonus educational videos
- Extra reading lists and references to dive deeper into various topics
- Pedagogical tools to be used with students
- Evaluation material
What will you gain as a participant?
As a participant, you will gain:
- Access to pioneering pedagogical tools and methods, as well as to a library of inspiring art, to foster transformative climate resilience education;
- Connections with members of a transnational community of educators;
- The ability to limit the climate anxiety of all your future students, while fostering their resilience, creativity and capacities to regenerate their ecosystems;
- A certificate of completion will also be available upon request once the acquisition of the competences has been validated.
You can also join the online course in Hungarian, Norwegian, Swedish, and Ukrainian.
In which other ways can you participate in the CLARITY project?
If you are a teacher or an educator, you are welcome to take part in the CLARITY project in various ways:
- The self-paced course is offered in other European languages than English. You can already join the self-paced course in Ukrainian here. The self-paced course will soon be available in German, Hungarian, Swedish and Norwegian.
- Our partner Climate Creativity will offer an in-person learning retreat in Norway and in Norwegian in January. For more information, contact: [email protected]
- You can join our ‘transforming climate education’ online community for teachers and educators here. There you will be informed of our online monthly meet ups for teachers and educators.
Whether you are a teacher and educator, or a supportive human, please help us promote and disseminate the policy-brief advocating for transformative climate change education for children and youth that you can find here. This will help us create the conditions that we need to transform climate education together.
For any other collaborations or ideas, please contact us: [email protected].
