Recommendations to policy makers

Recommendations in short

• 1: SELF-GOVERNANCE

  Policy-making should ensure a high degree of self-governance in schools, allowing the open science schooling approach in climate change education.  Policy-making should ensure that teachers have a high degree of methodological freedom in teaching. therefore, during students' climate change missions, the teacher assumes the role of scaffolder, while the students themselves choose their own locally anchored climate change mission, choose the methods to be used, choose what information will be relevant for their own climate change mission (learning on demand), and thereby encouraging student-led initiatives at schools.

• 2: LOCAL ENGAGEMENT

  Policy-making should ensure more local engagement from local governments. Local governments have important roles to play in the field of climate change education and cross-sector collaboration to support the students' involvement in local matters through the open school approach

  In a 21st century context innovation is no longer expected to only be driven by public authorities or major private enterprises within a top-down approach.

  On the contrary, innovation is expected to be driven by citizens, all sorts of community resources – and by any stakeholder in the community able to and willing to change things.

• 3: BOTTOM-UP INITIATIVES

  Policy-making should support a bottom-up approach in which the innovation of climate change education increasingly emerges from pioneer schools and teachers, in order to move the educational system towards a more open 21st  century didactics. Local policy-making should support, celebrate and reward pioneer schools and teachers engaging in climate change missions trough open science schooling.

  In addition the extended roles in the community of the school should build on the students’ open science schooling engagement and take this engagement to a higher level. This bottom-up approach will ensure that the school’s engagement is continuously focused on the students’ learning and co-driving.

• 4: EDUCATION

  Policy-making should provide possibilities for continuous education for teachers in the field of Climate Change Education and new didactic approaches such as the open science schooling, and produce an age-appropriate curriculum in order to provide a framework and opportunities for climate education at all levels of education.

• 5: INVOLVE COMMUNITY

  Policy-making should support schools at all levels to establish climate change education in collaboration with relevant community stakeholders, including the private sector. The Commission strongly recommend educational collaboration with the private and social sectors, but very few local governments are taking action to support this.

• 6: STRONG NATIONAL COMITTMENT

  Policy-making at national level should ensure that climate change education is a part of all academic disciplines and of course be a significant part of science education in the national curriculum.

• 7: COMMISSION EVALUATION AND CRITIQUE OF NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL POLICY

  The Commission should make an effort to ensure that the Commission educational innovation is followed up at national level. It is recommended that there should be a much greater focus on competency as the goal of teaching.

• 8: CHANGING SCHOOL CURRICULA

  - School curricula is increasingly overloaded in most European schools and leaves very little space for alternative and innovative learning activities.

  - There are few signs that this will change in the near future, and therefore experimentation must happen in spite of school curricula.

  - Most European governments are more interested in the average national test scores than in the young students’ learning.

  Therefore, when approaching the crucial question about how innovation missions can be integrated in school curricula it has to be changed.

   

  Schools, teachers and students should continuously put pressure on educational authorities at all levels to change school curricula with the aim to reserve considerable time in the weekly schedules for non-subject defined and test-free activities.

  Such non-subject defined and test-free activities might precisely be used for innovation missions, entrepreneurial engagement – or similar forms of experimentation equipping the young students with 21st century skills.

  For example, public authorities in future-oriented community, regions or countries might decide that 1 day a week is reserved for such experimentation, and that the school will be open after normal school hours to continued student engagement.