School Partnership
Participatory development of learning materials and educational offers on social-ecological challenges of the SDGs and the Good Life for All.
The aim of this two-year pilot project is to create and apply innovative educational formats and materials from an international perspective for environmental education in Germany, Croatia, Slovenia, and Tanzania. The project is aimed at school students and young adults. They will learn about the connections between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN), as well as the international interconnections of the addressed topics. For example, the project looks at how the digitalization of various areas of life is seen in Germany as a contribution to climate action. This is contrasted with the ecological and social consequences of the extraction of raw materials in East Africa, which is necessary for the material basis of digitization. In particular, the broad-based constellation of actors (schools, non-governmental organizations and universities) and their international configuration is meant to facilitate a productive process among the diverse project partners and to result in high-quality educational materials.
In the first year of the project, two online symposia with teachers from Germany and Tanzania as well as students and environmental experts from civil society organizations from Croatia and Slovenia will take place for the development of educational materials. This approach reflects the insight that problems with globally interconnected causes also require globally interconnected answers and perspectives. In this way, the symposia pool the expertise of the various project partners and ensure that the concrete living situations in all four project regions are considered when dealing with SDG-relevant topics, such as digitalization. Based on the results of the symposia, three target group-oriented simulation games on the project topics will be developed. The simulation games will enable the target groups to put themselves in the shoes of people affected in different ways and to reflect on the conditions of international frameworks for environmental justice and resource equality.
In the second year of the project, the 15 participating teachers from Germany and Tanzania apply the simulation games in their teaching, while the students from the partner school classes take part in an online exchange. The project partners in Croatia and Slovenia also use the educational materials in schools and in their extracurricular environmental education with students and youths at science festivals and summer academies.
The incorporation of concrete and everyday life and country perspectives, already at the stage of the content creation, ensures that the target groups can personally relate to the conveyed topics and are motivated to change their own perspectives and practices. The project channels the resulting motivation among participants by guiding them to host an “International Day of the SDGs and the Good Life for All”, taking place on the same day in all four project countries. As part of this event, the target groups themselves become transformative and communicate the project insights that they have created. In doing so, they will employ various inspiring formats to deepen their newly acquired insights and to communicate the importance of the project topics to the wider public.
Project Partners
The project is funded by the German Federal Foundation for the Environment (DBU)
and by Engagement Global with resources from the
