The Climate Change Challenge
Start date: Aug 1, 2014,
End date: Mar 31, 2015
PROJECT
FINISHED
Our project started from the discussions with the youngsters with whom we work daily on the most interesting topic to tackle in 2014. Since in the same period it was published the 5th report by the Intergovenrmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC – http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/) that stressed once more on the dramatic climate changes, the discussion became very much focused on this topic and showed very clearly the need to go deeper on it. As a matter of fact our youngsters were still too young in 2006 and 2007 when the last IPCC report or the famous movie “An Inconvenient Truth” were released to pretend from them a knowledge of the issue that would go further than a school research, but now they’ve grown up to become young adults and to put themselves many new questions.
That is why we decided to offer a complete and clear access to the data elaborated by the climatologists working for the United Nations as one of the main tools to satisfy the thirst for a deeper knowledge of the climate change issue that our participants had expressed. The main goal of our exchange was thus that of informing and making more aware the participants of the risks we are all running and of the responsibilities that each one should take, mostly meaning for them the responsibility of being personally the bearers among their peers of a message for the active engagement and for the dissemination of knowledge in favor of the environment.
That’s why 22 young participants aged 15-19 from Italy, Hungary, Spain and Belgium, most from a background made of social, economic and geographic challenges, met for 7 days in Sardinia, in the middle of a natural context very well conserved and thus absolutely coherent with the need for a reflection upon our environment, to discuss together, explore, question each other and find answers on the issue and to produce several videos to be used to disseminate 2 messages: their conclusions on the main topic in the groups videos and what it means to live together the experience of a youth exchange in the Erasmus+ framework and what are the opportunities offered by the European Union to youth in general.
The work has been held with a variety of methods and activities all based on the common ground of the active participation and of the central role of the young participants, in an intercultural non formal and informal learning process in which the main resource were the very same young participants and their peer to peer cooperation.
A main role has been played by creativity and by the motivation to know the other participants and their cultures, in a week in which the learning came mainly from non-formal and informal moments, trough thematic workshops, video making, games, excursions and a lot of time to share with the others.
The final results has been the abovementioned videos that, in the form of short movies, offer a tangible result in term of messages to be shared and in term of a stronger set of artistic and digital competencies of the kind that is most appreciated by youngsters. The choice of making videos has been also strictly connected with the need to create something that can be easily shared and broadly disseminated at no cost through the very same social media so much used by our groups.
Giving the responsibility to a group of youngsters to spread a message among their peers is probably the best investment in knowledge for a topic so urgent and complex as the one of the climate change and the changes it will impose on our life style on the very next years.
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