3.2 Your climate education action plan
Now that you have completed your reflection, move on to the next activity in which you’ll create your climate education action plan. Creating this action plan will help consolidate what you’ve learned on the course. You could use your action plan as the basis for implementing climate crisis-related teaching in your own setting. In addition, you may wish to share your action plan with other educators, both for feedback and as a way of collaborating to pool resources and discuss ideas.
Activity 4 Your climate education action plan
In this activity, you’ll design an intervention that responds to the climate emergency through an aspect of teaching or learning. Examples of interventions could include:
- a lesson or workshop plan
- a digital storytelling project
- a citizen science initiative
- the creation or development of an educators’ community of practice
- a climate café initiative
- the creation or transformation of a curriculum
- the creation or transformation of an educational policy at an organisational level.
Although you might decide to try more than one of your ideas, you’re encouraged to focus on just one for now to make your plan manageable and achievable. There are three parts to the action plan: describing your context, describing your intervention; and explaining the rationale for your project.
Part 1: Context
Provide a summary of the educational context for which you’re developing your intervention, to include information about:
- the subject area
- the wider learning programme, course, community initiative, organisational initiative, policy framework that the intervention sits within
- target learners/participants sector, level, qualifications, if relevant key topics.
You might also consider and summarise:
- any interactions you will need to make for the intervention to be successfully delivered
- whether you will need the support of any gatekeepers to get access to your audience
- whether you will need to undertake any promotional activity
- whether you will need to lobby or negotiate with individuals holding the power to take the actions you want to happen
- opportunities for flexible and accessible delivery to ensure your intervention allows for equitable, accessible, safe participation by diverse groups, given the target learners/participants and context.
Part 2: Intervention
Produce a detailed description of how your intervention would be implemented. Your description should include:
- An intervention title.
- The key goal(s) or (where appropriate) up to three learning outcomes that the intervention will achieve.
- Information about any teaching and/or learning activities involved, with timings, including noting whether the focus will be on individual or group learning (or both). You should include at least one activity that gives the opportunity for assessment or for reflection.
- Details of any technology involved, including giving learners a choice of technology where appropriate.
- Any supporting resources to be used. For a lesson or workshop, these may include academic or teaching resources, worksheets, quizzes, etc. For policy developments, resources may include existing policies and legislation, either in the direct policy area or from other areas that may be used as inspiration. You should also consider any human resources required, including your own time, and any funding needed.
Write your intervention description so it could be shared with people in other locations or contexts, and they would have the information they need to deliver something similar.
Part 3: Rationale
Provide a rationale making the case for the intervention itself and explaining the reasons for the decisions you made when designing your intervention. This should include an explanation of how your intervention sits within the local, national or global climate crisis movement and how your design decisions have been influenced by the relationship between the local, national and global contexts.
Explain the decisions you’ve made in respect of as many of these as are appropriate to your context:
- the underpinning pedagogic theories, frameworks and/or models that support your intervention
- how you will engage participants in activities and their role in delivering your goals for the intervention
- any technology involved in the intervention
- supporting resources you plan to use in the intervention, or that you plan to draw upon if working in a policy context
- the aspects of accessibility, equity and flexibility that you considered
- any ideas covered within this course or elsewhere, and why they are relevant.
Sharing your action plan
Once you have completed your climate education action plan, you might like to share it with someone you trust for some informal feedback. This might be a friend or a colleague or someone you know through one of the sustainability networks or communities of practice that you’ll find out about in the next activity. We hope you’ll use the same networks and communities to share your feedback about how your ideas have worked in practice. You might also want to share your action plan with others.