What are the key themes of our climate education project?
HARP is designed to foster actionable, inclusive, and emotionally-engaging CCE strategies to promote climate change mitigation. Its objective is to transform CCE into a primary driver for climate action, making CCE more holistic by incorporating various disciplinary perspectives. The project is designed to offer actionable recommendations based on our research, ultimately aiming to cultivate a climate-literate populace pivotal for the imminent climate challenges.
Team Success Stories
This team explores what drives success in Climate Change Education (CCE) at secondary schools. We investigate how students' emotions, such as anxiety, hope, resilience, and empowerment, relate to their action competence and to CCE teaching strategies. Additionally, we examine factors contributing to teachers' successful approaches to CCE.
What we plan:
- Collect data from 20–30 high schools in Czechia, Austria, and the Netherlands, involving both students and teachers.
- Organize focus groups with experts to identify key factors in successful CCE.
- Share findings with educators and the professional community to improve CCE practices.
Team Universities
This study examines how Climate Change Education (CCE) is integrated into university policies, curricula, and teaching. We analyze institutional strategies for climate commitments, curricula to assess CCE coverage in courses, and educators' practices to explore pedagogical approaches and climate-related emotions. Through HARP’s collaboration, we identify emerging CCE concepts across three countries, focusing on policy implementation, curricular framing, and teaching strategies.
What we plan:
- Examine how universities integrate CCE into policies.
- Assess how CCE is embedded in university curricula, including compulsory and elective courses, to determine students' exposure to climate topics.
- Investigate how university teachers approach CCE, including pedagogical methods and the role of emotions like climate anxiety and hope.
- Identify emerging CCE concepts, methods, and theories across institutions in three participating countries.
- Share our findings to enhance the integration of CCE, including the emotional and socio-economic perspective, into university-level education
Team Emotions
This team assesses the effectiveness of various approaches in fostering emotional resilience among university students in the context of climate change and crisis. We investigate how different therapeutic methods support students in coping with climate-related emotions and building long-term psychological resilience. By comparing multiple strategies, we aim to identify the most effective tools for strengthening well-being in Climate Change Education (CCE).
What we plan:
- Conduct in-depth interviews with graduates of the self-development group course at MUNI.
- Integrate and evaluate new approaches, including gestalt therapy, biosynthesis, and deep ecology, in climate education.
- Compare the effectiveness of different therapeutic modalities in supporting emotional resilience.
- Identify best practices for addressing climate-related emotions, such as anxiety and hope, in educational settings.
- Share findings to help educators incorporate emotional resilience strategies into CCE.