Development of sustainability competences for analysing and narrating real-world climate data

Climate change education is crucial to equip young people with the tools to help them envision and thus achieve a carbon-free society. Incorporating climate data into school curricula fosters a personal connection to global environmental challenges and enhances scientific inquiry and systemic thinking skills.

CLIMADEMY (CLIMAte change teachers' acaDEMY) is a three-year Erasmus+ teacher training project involving four European HUBs in Finland, Germany, Greece, and Italy. It aims to integrate real-world data into educational contexts to regenerate the teaching and learning process addressing diverse curricular needs while fostering environmental as well as social and economic sustainability competences (Bianchi et al., 2022; Purvis et al., 2019).

As part of the Italian HUB, we present a project born from the intersection between the objectives of CLIMADEMY and the initiatives of a scientific high school (Liceo Scientifico ‘A. Einstein’ in Rimini), which has been collaborating for several years with the physics education research group of the University of Bologna. This project, called Salomon, involves five classes  (four grade-12 and one grade-11) and aims to develop sustainability competences described by the European GreenComp framework. Salomon encourages students to tackle global complex issues like climate change through innovative interdisciplinary approaches that cultivate problem-framing, analytical, and systemic thinking skills.

Salomon promotes collaboration between scientific and humanistic disciplines, drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Teachers co-design and carry out activities in classrooms and physics laboratories, emphasizing diverse disciplinary epistemologies and employing multiple languages - textual, photographic, theatrical - to convey the contents learnt. This approach allows students to engage with complexity and sustainability concepts through varied perspectives.

At the project’s conclusion, a dedicated module will delve into the topic of climate change, with the ambition that the various interdisciplinary activities carried out in the previous months will have provided not only greater knowledge and skills, but above all the attitude to consciously reflect and work on real-world data. Students will be asked to analyse, interpret and narrate climate data from local and global sources, including monitoring stations like Finokalia (University of Crete), the E3CI European Extreme Events Climate Index (IFAB foundation, Bologna), and the En-ROADS climate simulator. 

This approach fosters scientific literacy and cultivates confidence in the scientific endeavour to support evidence-based decision-making, empowering students to act as agents of sustainability in the world. Salomon offers a model that is adaptable to different educational settings that want to incorporate real data into curricula within a complexity-oriented education that aims to equip students with the thinking tools needed to address pressing environmental challenges and contribute to a decarbonised and sustainable society.

Bianchi, G., Pisiotis, U., & Cabrera Giraldez, M. (2022). GreenComp – The European sustainability competence framework. In M. Bacigalupo & Y. Punie (Eds.), European Commission, Joint Research Centre. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2760/13286   

Purvis, B., Mao, Y. & Robinson, D. (2019). Three pillars of sustainability: in search of conceptual origins. Sustainable Sciences, 14, 681–695. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-018-0627-5