More green you live, more life you give

More green, more life

As world citizens we are worried about the climate emergency we are living in, but as teachers we assume our responsibility to play our role finding solutions. Thus we strongly believe our pedagogical task must help children become more ecologically responsible. What is more we all think that schools must act as a reference of what being ecologically responsible is. Besides, we believe in the importance of developing the European citizenship in our students, connecting schools from different parts of Europe, exchanging good practices between colleagues and having students working in international cooperative teams. Through these international relationships we will be helping children develop useful skills as 21st century citizens as well as promoting cultural exchanges that will broaden their minds. We understand the climate emergency as a global problem, so it’s a great opportunity to be used as a challenge in a cooperative work between schools from different countries. Our ecological and pedagogical goals can be reached by applying the same project. After having analysed our schools’ realities and their ecological footprints we have set several goals to be achieved at the end of the project. We want to engage al the community in the project. Teachers, families, students and the rest of the community should work in the same direction as a way to have a deeper impact in our communities, spreading our goals and achievements as much as possible. We are five schools at the association; all of these schools can complement each other by their specific characteristics. We are from different countries (Turkey, Rumania, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain) and we are going to exchange our best practices in order to learn from each other. We have an ambassador at our association and it will be great to improve our skills in European projects. Each participant will work in their own tasks to cooperate and create together the whole project. On the one hand, our final goal is for our schools to become a model of ecological behaviour, maximizing the impact on the community by spreading the project’s ideas through families and the social media. We want to shrink our ecological footprint as much as possible in terms of resources consumption and waste production and sorting. On the other hand, behind all these ecological objectives there are the educational ones. We want our students to develop their cooperative working skills and critical thinking. We want children to grow as responsible 21st century citizens and, of course, we want them to improve their communicative competence. The students will carry out their realities’ analysis and they will set their own goals aimed at shrinking the schools’ ecological footprint. Children will be working under the PBL methodology within international teams. Each activity will be focused at finding solutions to our main problem. We are going to be using eTwining as a cooperative platform, but it is not the only one, Padlet, Canva, google forms and other tools are going to be of great help when it comes to have the students engaged with the project. To close-up the project, children will plan a way to disseminate the findings of their project in order to open it to the entire community. Finally, we see this project as a turning point from which on there is no way back. Once the schools have entered in a new reality in which their ecological footprint is taken into account, all the community will work in the same direction, new habits and routines will be established, thus the project will have been an authentic transforming one