Methodology
An innovative hybrid participatory approach is designed in the demonstration sites (DS) to jointly co-design, co-implement and co-evaluate a set of intervention measures to promote sustainability competences in every school or university. It integrates elements of research and elements of engagement, in particular reconvened group-based techniques, and it partly draws upon the STAVE tool. To engage students, teachers, and administrative staff, Sustainability Competence Teams (SCT) are organised at the demonstration sites. In addition, Sustainability Competence Committees (SCC) are set-up to engage the wider educational community, integrating additional actors from the demonstration sites (school directors, sustainability managers, etc.) and other external actors (NGOs, local authorities, etc.).
Three Sustainability Competence Teams (one with students, one with teachers, and one with staff) and a Sustainability Competence Committee are set up at each demonstration site. Each group meets periodically, in up to 6 times through the project. These deliberative workshops facilitate and promote deep reflection, invite participants to challenge their own views and assumptions, and foster the elaboration of views and arguments in a collaborative way. They usually consist of three stages: information sharing, dialogue, and deliberation. Dialogue and deliberation is facilitated among all actors with the ultimate aim of fostering transformational change towards sustainable development. Stimulus materials and problem structuring methods are used to promote deliberation and reflection.
Citizen science is the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge. ECF4CLIM applies the principles of citizen science, thereby contributing to the acquisition of skills and knowledge by generating local data, engaging citizens in concrete action, raising awareness, and empowering people to adopt new ways of behaviour in favour of climate protection and sustainable development. The research questions and methods are co-designed jointly by the project team and the involved educational communities and targeted at identified and conceptualised real-world problems.
To elaborate the initial ECF a collective meaning-making process that engaged a large international group of students, parents, teachers and experts in education is set up. The participatory crowdsourcing tool helps civic opinion conceptualise the competencies in climate change and sustainable development. It also ensures the relevance of these competencies to the involved communities, fostering ownership of the outcomes amongst the educational community.
The project focuses on the following environmental sectors: transport, green procurement, green spaces, indoor air quality, energy, water and waste. These environmental sectors are evaluated via key performance indicators (KPIs) through technical assessments, IoT solutions, and questionnaire-based behaviour surveys at the selected educational establishments. Technical assessments are based on inspections and check-list sheets to describe building characteristics, equipment, activities, behaviours, occupation profiles, and resource consumption at the premises. IoT solutions are applied to conduct on-side measurements of energy and water consumption, indoor air quality, and comfort parameters. Online surveys are carried out to monitor the performance of the selected educational communities regarding individual and collective behaviour, such as transport patterns and daily habits and practices in the environmental areas evaluated.
The Environmental Footprint Calculator uses LCA to assess the environmental performance of educational institutions by characterising the educational system, identifying the main energy and material inputs and outputs involved, and collecting data on the environmental performance of the institutions. The main input data relate to aspects such as the consumption of electricity, fuel and water, the amount of green space, the operation and maintenance of buildings and infrastructure, and the quantities and types of materials required for the educational activity, such as books, computers, office equipment, as well as data related to daily commuting to the educational sites. This tool allows students to identify critical points and potential for improvement.
A dynamic energy building performance tool is developed to evaluate the energy saving potentials achieved by the implementation of different retrofitting measures in schools. This tool gathers the initial building information, queries the simulation database available and quantifies the retrofitting percentage reached by the measure selected. The use of this tool allows estimating the energy response of a representative classroom when different retrofitting measures are implemented. Seasonal maps are developed to highlight the thermal comfort zone inside a building and different energy efficiency measures to achieve this thermal neutrality. These maps are based on the Givoni bioclimatic charts and use, as inlet information, local natural resources. The use of these charts allows quantifying the climate severity and predicting whether passive heating or cooling measures are likely to improve thermal comfort in a building. The use of the toolkit by technical and no-technical staff involved in the process of building renovation can inspire these actors to adopt new technical solutions to renovation.
All involved actors explore and possibly revisit their ‘intervention theories’, in light of the experience gained. The exploration focuses on the relation between the expected and actually observed causal relationships between policy interventions and competences, asking questions such as: “did the intervention operate as expected? Which unanticipated factors constrained or facilitated the improvement of sustainability competences? Did the intervention and the evaluation process foster empowerment of the involved stakeholders, by helping them to better identify opportunities for and obstacles to desired changes towards sustainability?”. SCT/SCCs are used to organise this process of participatory reflection on whether and how the interventions operated as expected and whether the competences improved and why.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union and European Education and Culture Executive Agencies (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
