How female students can engage in science learning through climate change missions

Women and girls have a crucial role in spearheading climate science. As valuable members of society, they deserve to participate equally in public issues. New research outlines that their participation typically generates effective climate outcomes, from adopting sustainable land management strategies to analyzing ways to prioritize renewable energy, all of which are desirable outcomes in climate mitigation. But how does this tie into the bigger picture of female inclusivity in climate science?

Research demonstrates that due to socially prescribed gender roles, women assess risks differently to men and typically prioritize the welfare of their families and communities in resource-management decisions. Measures that improve women’s access to healthcare, education and representation strengthen their adaptive capacity, enabling them to respond more hastily and easily to the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, women continue to struggle for equal participation in environmental decision-making, and female-headed community organisations commonly struggle to access climate funding. Support for women’s initiatives and access to resources can drive effective climate action that meets the needs of communities. This is where change happens.

Female Students working with science

Recommendation from the practice partners

Even though the girls are already leading their own solutions to the interlinked challenges of climate change and gender inequality, to scale these up they need support. Small innovations in climate finance mechanisms can transform fiscal access  for female-inclusive  science organisations.

Providing hedge funds, flexible timelines and institutional support for female-led organisations applying for climate finance can also support equitability in those fields - these are just a few examples of effective strategies which are most pertinent in areas where gender-responsive finance is geared towards both adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. All in all, improving the balance in these areas can support long-term capacity-building for women’s climate leadership. But we're still confined to the school environment, and in that case, the girls are well-supported.

The teachers' role in this subject would be an encouraging one; most pedagogues in this day and age are female, and they could reflect their own experiences unto their students, mainly girls, to help them overcome their own hardships. Assuming an almost parental role in spearheading the women towards a greater career in science should be the number one priority in this sort of education.

Female student with t-shirt #Steam

Recommendation from the quality assurance partners

CLIMATE CHANGE PREVENTION – THE ENGAGEMENT

The five major problems facing humanity in the coming century are feeding the population, the control of disease, generating sufficient energy, supplying enough water, and global climate change.

If it is to meet the needs of the future, school science has to develop opportunities for students to explore what it is that scientists do and why that contribution is both enduring and meaningful.

Osborne and Dillon, “Science education in Europe – Critical reflections”, 2008

 

Why is climate change prevention efficient, and why it can work as an engagement?

  • One of the toughest resistances towards science education among teenage learners has always been and increasingly is: that they do not wish to identify with the images of scientists and a life in science.
  • As explained, open science schooling engages the young students deeply (not superficially) in interesting and important science activities in their community.
  • And his is where climate change comes in – and opens up a giant door to students’ re-engagement in science.
  • For the first time in modern history, science learning can be made incredibly attractive to teenage students – using climate change prevention as a platform for open schooling and for deep student engagement.
  • The urgency of climate change prevention serves as a powerful driver of students’ science engagement.
  • Using climate change as a platform for science education offers fundamentally different images of science and of what a life in science can be, such as:- climate change gives practical approaches to all major scientific fields and encourages cross-subject learning
  • climate change strongly links science to social, political and cultural life and to society’s call for responsible science and research
  • climate change needs to be seriously addressed at local level, in all communities
  • the local authorities have a great and increasing interest in mobilizing its young people for climate change prevention
  • climate change prevention is personal, local and global at the same time, offering very many levels of learning and taking action, including the students’ personal lives
  • climate change offers very powerful collective and individual missions and demands local and global action and accomplishment. Climate change missions are perfect science missions.
  • climate change is taken seriously by almost all community players and science resources, offering community collaborators a strong motivation for working with the student teams
  • climate change education provides a bridge between science, research and knowledge on one side and the emotional life of teenagers on the other
  • climate change prevention is not about theory, but about taking urgent action at all levels and learning through this engagement.

For all this and for the first time science education becomes relevant, personal, attractive, emotional, and incredibly exciting for the young students, allowing them to integrate new science images in the forming of their identities.

In addition, it is well-known that especially female teenagers are concerned about climate change and what it will do to our planet and to our life – and to the life of our children.

This means that science education based on climate change prevention offers female students in particular a new way to reconcile science and female values.

Summarizing

  • Climate change-based science learning is dramatically different from traditional, abstract science teaching because it is first of all action based.
  • Even more, climate change threats will increase across the next many decades, which means that young students will be able to use climate change action to meet and learn science for as long as we can forecast.
  • This perspective is totally linked to the great interest of the European Commission in inviting and encouraging schools to become AGENTS OF CHANGE in the community.
  • Climate change missions can be passed on continuously from one student team to another, meaning that climate missions can be continued at all levels, creating even strong ecosystems of climate change prevention driven by teenage learners and by schools!

The climate change missions can be continued:

  • in the schools (involving new teams of students and teachers)
  • in the school community (the school as a change agent)
  •  in the local community (establishing cross-sector collaboration to take the climate change prevention missions further)
  • at a global level (continuously promoting the project’s messages in social and gaming networks and linking to similar initiatives in other parts of the world)

All this makes climate change-based science learning much more attractive to less academic learners and learners that sometimes drop out of school, mainly due to traditional science teaching.

Last but not least, climate change should be no less than a CARPE DIEM for national and local educational authorities wishing to re-engage more young people in science.

For policy this is a historic momentum that should not be lost: policy can, at different levels, help innovate traditional science education, engage young students in science and at the same time fight climate change.