ECF4CLIM - A EUROPEAN COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK FOR A LOW CARBON ECONOMY AND SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH EDUCATION
Acting now for climate and life sustainability!
ECF4CLIM employs a multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and participatory process to create and validate a European Competence Framework (ECF) for transformative change. This framework empowers the educational community to combat climate change and promote sustainable development.
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Developing an innovative hybrid participatory approach grounded in participatory action research and citizen science, ECF4CLIM collaborates with selected schools and universities to co-design the ECF by:
1) elaborating an initial ECF, supported by crowdsourcing of ideas and analysis of existing ECFs,
2) establishing the baseline of individual and collective competences, as well as environmental performance indicators,
3) implementing practical, replicable and context adapted technical, behavioural, and organisational interventions that foster the acquisition of competences,
4) evaluating the ability of the interventions to strengthen sustainability competences and environmental performance
5) validating the ECF.
Co-design of ECF:
10 research partners and 13 demonstration sites (schools and universities in
Finland, Portugal, Romania and Spain)
The initial ECF is a practical document describing the essential individual and collective competences, enablers and constraints of promoting environmental performance of educational institutions. It draws from the results of the ECF4CLIM crowdsourcing results, document analysis, and literature review. It is based on the sustainability competences outlined in GreenComp and further develops. ECF is structured as a Roadmap and aims to provide tools for different stakeholders to map and foster the enablers and overcome the constraints of sustainability in various educational contexts.
The Roadmap comprises four steps:
- engages people through reflection and inclusive dialogue on the values and meanings of sustainability,
- find systemic connections between everyday life at school or another educational organisation, to promote critical thinking,
- envisioning futures, adaptability, mapping possibilities for change and visions of a desirable future,
- concrete action and evaluating the results
The hybrid participatory approach was developed and run in the demonstration sites (DS) to jointly co-design a set of intervention measures identified as the most suitable for fostering sustainability in their own school or university.
It integrates elements of research and citizen engagement, in particular group-based techniques. The approach partly draws upon the STAVE tool. To engage students, teachers, and administrative staff, Sustainability Competence Teams (SCT) are organized at all involved DSs. To engage the wider educational community, Sustainability Competence Committees (SCC) were set-up, integrating additional actors from the DSs (school directors, sustainability managers, etc.) and other external actors (NGOs, local authorities, etc.). Notably, the SCTs incorporated those in charge of making the decisions that condition the possibilities of transforming the planned measures into concrete actions.
A set of specific measures, co-designed to empower and promote sustainability at the demonstration sites in Finland, Portugal, Romania, and Spain was produced. Some of them were selected to be supported by ECF4 CLIM implementation.
