 Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for this tomatic webinar on school education gateway. School education gateway is an initiative of the European Union and is placed to engage with European policy and practice for school education. In this webinar we will first learn about climate change education through the experience of the no-profit Italian Climate Network and its activities with schools including challenges and opportunities when talking about climate change and related issues in classrooms. For these it is with us today Chiara Solletti, the Human Rights and Climate Policy Advisor for Italian Climate Network. Chiara advocates for the introduction of a gender perspective in the Paris Agreement implementation and she's currently lives in London where she also works for the climate kick as regional innovation scheme project officer. The second presentation will emphasize what that with a changing rhetoric and attitude towards the climate crisis. This is important for all teachers to reflect on and update their teaching practice. You will learn about an innovative collection of teaching resources, the story of their creation and how teachers can't better address climate breakdown with Colt Turner, our second speaker. He is out of geography at the school in Amshaire and had a thought in a variety of settings over the past 10 years and takes a particular interest in social and environmental activism. Before we leave on the floor to our first speaker Chiara, I remember you that you can post your questions in the chat box and we will go back to them as more as possible after the presentation. Also please note that this webinar session is being recorded and the recording will be available after on the webinar web page on school education gateway to get together with our speakers presentations. So thank you very much to our speakers and I ended over to you so you can introduce yourself more in details as starts the presentation right away. Hello everyone can you please confirm if you can hear me? Yes we can hear you Chiara. Perfect. I'm Chiara and thank you for the lovely introduction Inna and sorry I didn't understand if the participants would need to introduce themselves first. You can go on with the presentation. Sorry I wasn't sure about that so thank you for joining us. I'm here representing Italian Common Network and I am about to start my presentation here. Chiara the presentation was already there. I could no move it that's why I'm trying to understand what is happening with the app but that I just don't know my laptop so sorry. Thank you. Thank you. I will otherwise I'm here to help. Yes there is some kind of problem with thank you. Can you see the presentation moving to the slides moving? Yes just tell me when you need me to move to the next slide. So I'm here today representing the Italian Common Network and I'm here Italian Common Network is a you focused organization focusing on the International Equity and Youth Empowerment and among we have an among other of our activities our main educational program is the school project and I would like to show you the next slide please if it's possible. Thank you Inna and sorry again for this. Since 2013 we started piloting an educational initiative. We noticed that there was a lack in the educational system in Italy about about climate change and in general environmental education. We started piloting this program trying to study different links on how to approach students that are usually secondary school students between 14 and 18 years old and in 2013 we finally launched our officially the school project in Brigetto Scuola. Among that the Brigetto Scuola in the school project is not the only educational activity that we have but we also educate and empower youth through our participation to the UNF triple C negotiations at the COPS and also with some international work. If it's possible to move to the next slide Inna so and there should be if you click again there should be an image appearing sorry for that. So we're particularly we're particularly proud of this project as we really tried to as I said to feel a gap that there was in the schools there is what is called a civic education in schools that is something is kind of is a kind of education that should provide the general skills to the students in their everyday life and the goal is to make them better citizens. As part of that we definitely saw that there was a lack as I said in climate and environmental education. If we can move to the next slide thank you so and once again if you click again we have several topics in which we focus so our lessons they're not only about explaining what is climate change of course we also do that but we also focus on different aspects of a phenomenon or a phenomenon that as you probably know better than me is quite complex has different angles and should have an intersectional approach so we started with some lessons like on climate energy and climate energy and energy climate negotiations and other topics first to then in to their starting introduce some more intersectional more intersectional topics like human rights and health and this is actually something that I would like to stress because it's not an a traditional approach at least in Italy to speak about environment and climate change the international the intersectional approach is not used and how we started developing these lessons we basically created a series of presentations and of course on the side we also created a tool for our um relatory that are basically our trained stuff that goes to the schools to deliver these lessons I'm one of the authors of these lessons I authored the climate and human rights lesson but of course I cannot be present every time to deliver it in schools and we wanted to ensure the maximum quality possible when it came to the delivery of this of this course and for this reason we prepared this presentation but also on the side a series of a summary of what it should be the general arch of the topics there should be there should be addressed during the lesson and extra resources especially if the person delivering the lesson doesn't have the appropriate background or specific or specific studies to support his presentation and then answer the questions of the students another thing that we keep in mind is of course is to tailor our way of communicating depending on the age if we have in front of us like a class of 14 years old we're going probably to focus less on the data and more to make sure um and we will focus more to have a certain messages passed to have to make sure that they have a set of messages clears like what is exactly how much change or why we can say that an event in the weather we cannot connect it directly to climate change but we have to wait for a certain amount of time we give them basically all the tools to understand and then navigated information they can they can find and if they are of course or during age we sometimes go more in depth when it comes to data and other details but I can assure you that a 14 year old can really surprise you and sometimes I come with really specific questions if it's possible to move to the next slide it would be fantastic so the reason why it was important for us to move towards an intersectional approach it is because we need that is for us is the way forward there is really not a way to address climate change in a different way from now on it's we don't have time it's a complex it's a complex issue and it's really really important for um young people to understand the implications of this phenomenon and that's why we started talking about human rights and health and making them understand that how different vulnerable groups are different in effect are differently affected depending on the level of recognition and implementation of the human rights and the level of resilience of the country and the kind of challenges that the my that the my have in their country and we also stress I have really another really important concept if we can move to the other slide thank you we also really talk about climate justice and this is a concept that is always and often well this was really new before the movement of riders for futures but and after that became definitely more acknowledged from the kids and but definitely before it was a concept that it wasn't familiar with them so kids were not understanding how basically the countries that contributed the most to the emissions that created the problem climate change are also those that are more resilient and that at the moment are not paying the higher cost who is paying the higher cost are those countries that less contributed to the to the problem and we always stress this kind of this kind of of topics if we can move to the next slide please so yes it's we really stress once again this this concept and it always raised a lot of interesting questions with the kids so I'm if any one of you in your in your experience with the kids in school is worried to bring them to know to bring them closer to topics that are actually quite complex and they interconnected among that I would definitely encourage you to not be scared and go for it actually the response that we had so far it was fantastic and they really raised the interaction of the kids if we can move to the next slide please I was again thank you so far the school project has been really positive in our cycle between 2013 and 2020 we reached 45 school 30 cities and 11 regions and the the feedback has been and the response from the kids has been extremely positive we have now solid relations with several schools that calls us every year and the teachers are particularly enthusiastic when it comes to the problems that we had with this project I can tell you that in general in Italy is difficult to integrate our activities in the in the time that is given to school for extra activities can you still hear me yes I can hear you apologies everything went back black on my laptop sorry for that I can see you again or maybe not sorry let me just try this it's one of those days my apologies okay here I am again thank you so as I was saying yes one of the problems with the Italian schools is to find the time to integrate our activities they don't have the many hours to integrate extra curricular activities and in general there is the fact that we are not like concentrating the curricula and it's actually the kind of gap that we are trying to create another problem is also the preparation of the teachers the teachers that they contact us usually are teachers that are familiar with the with the topic that are really enthusiastic and that they wonder their students to learn more about that but they are the first ones to recognize that they don't have the preparation to give them the right information especially because these are topics that are so current that there is always there's always the need to be updated on them and that is something that we can provide outside of the school project we also have other activities if you can move to the next slide thank you Inna oh yes we reach more than eight thousand students oh yes one last thing to mention is the fact that that we are also implementing like a monitoring service so we are sharing now with schools uh anonymous surveys both to the teachers and to the students of course tailor the differently but that is also we're really trying to measure our impact the goal is to see if after our lesson the teachers observe that anything different in the preparation of the students and vice versa the students we ask them if something has changed in their life if they change the behavior at school at home or in general if they feel like they have more awareness of the problem and if they want to do something about climate change in one way or another so yes if you can move to the next slide we can I can give you a really quick overview of the other educational activities that we have another way in which we empower and educate youth and in this case they're usually older so it can go from 18 and above but um we give the possibility to our their associate I mean to have the members of the organization to participate in the cops they can candidate themselves every year and come with us in a small youth delegation and participate into the cops there are the conferences of the parties of the university what we do their information we teach them how to write articles videos and how to deal with social media and reporting on what is happening at the cops on the on the climate negotiations on specific topics that is an amazing experience for them to understand the human environment how multilateralism works and how such an important issue for the world is addressed in as I said in a systemic and multilateral approach if you can move forward thank you another other activities that we have at the cop it's um yes here there are some pictures sorry another activities that we have at the cops are the side events we should be in the in the next slide so we give the possibilities of the young to the to the young people yes this is the kind of reformation I was mentioning before the bulletin we give technical reports we teach them how to do it and yes here there are the side events so what we also give them the chance if there is a specific topic that they care about we give them the tools and the support to organize an event we have a network of organization that support us and that they're in contact with and that we collaborate with through the through the cops we're part of two consequences that is something that I'm going to tell you about in a second and often we have the chance to really um allow the young people to be there to interact with these experts and really create an event during this during the negotiations if we can move forward so yes we do some work across the two constituencies constituencies uh the constituencies are basically they call the groups is a space uh that was provided from the UNF Trako C to civil societies servers civil society can of course do its own work at the cop advocacy work they have an observer role and in order to do that they have to come together because of course often there are many small different organizations participating in these events that needs to provide the support to one another the the process is absolutely massive it's really difficult to navigate and this this is why these spaces were created so we're part of younger but it's the constituency for young people of organizations and the women and gender constituencies these two constituencies they really focus on several human rights issues and the work is particularly important for intersectional approach that we are trying to have in our organization and once again uh this is an interacting way the people from with young people from all over the world different entities understand how this process works it's a really highly um professionalizing and educational experience for for younger people if you can move forward thank you in addition to the advocacy action events and other things that we do in support to the work within the constituencies we also have our um our we try to have a dialogue with of course the delegate the italian delegation and the cops one of the more important achievements that we had it was to uh interact with the um environmental minister uh uh galletti at the time that assigned declaration of support uh where he was basically stating that he would have supported the introduction of the intergenerational equity principle in the paris agreement and is something that actually happened that you can find now um the intergenerational equity principle in the preamble of the paris agreement and there was a coordinated action that italian command network contributed in but it was a coordinated action of several youth organization part of the young constituency so just to give you an idea of how empowering can be being part of these groups during the negotiations and um there should be another slide we can move forward this is this was a general overview i wanted just to i wanted i wanted you to see your how our contacts are i'm absolutely open for questions sorry for the technical issues and thank you for your patience but this is more or less how our approach to education and how we're trying to empower young people and if you have any questions i'm here at your disposal thank you thank you i don't think you very much i think we can uh run with the presentation of uh paul and then we will of course get back to the questions of our participants hello paul can you tell me if you are great so you yes i can um hello so yeah i'm a teacher from the uk um i um head of department head of geography uh in a school which i'm quite fortunate in that i've got quite a bit of curriculum freedom and have the ability to um to very much take the curriculum and what is taught in in a particular direction and one thing i did want to just make a point of is to say today is a particularly um sort of exceptional day and i think it'd be worth just to mention that all of the events going on partly with coronavirus but there's also um to do with uh race in america and across the world i think it's important to realize that all of those issues are linked and that climate change is part of that and and part of the solution to climate change is um uh actually linked to all of these issues so i think as a teacher it's important to have that in mind um as an educator um i wanted to start by giving some context then to this uh these resources and the journey that we went in so we've obviously got this sort of iconic figure there of gretta tumbugga um on the front cover of time magazine and she is someone who has become such a figurehead um in terms of the eloquence and the ability um to communicate these ideas and then we've also in the uk we've had uh the extinction rebellion protests and actions and across the whole of europe and the rest of the world has been mirrored we've got Fridays for futures and what i wanted to emphasize here is that as a teacher i have felt that the rhetoric uh just in terms of the media and the general population and society has been um can i just double check sorry um can everyone hear me hear the sound there seems to be a few questions there about found okay sorry um it must be other people um so where i was going with that was that actually the rhetoric uh in the media has been shifting and that has then empowered me as a teacher to feel that i can then um talk about these issues in a different way and feel empowered to be able to teach differently and so um off the back of that i then reflected on the way that i was teaching climate change and also engaged with the wider teaching community about how they felt as well so in the uk we've had um the sorts of these sorts of actions where the uk government has been um there's been certain demands to say look we need to be teaching climate truth or we needed to be we need to teach the future and so there's certainly um a consensus around the idea that what is currently taught in schools doesn't necessarily reflect what is needed and what's necessary in order to prepare students but also to create the world that we want to live in and particularly what the students in the future will want to live in um this image um i've got a link here this is something from um someone called ed hawkins at the university of redding and i'll just post the link in the chat there it's called show your stripes and these are called the warming stripes and this is an important part of the journey because this really helps to visualize um the science and the fact behind this and that was also an important element of what i show you in a minute was to begin with the foundation of the science and so it shows this very clear warming trend and you can find these warming stripes for particular regions and countries around the world so one thing i would advocate is um using these within your own setting using these warming stripes um the other one that's very similar is the keeling curve which shows you the carbon dioxide concentrations and again um i'll just post a link to that you know at the moment we're just above 416 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere um and that's been increasing quite considerably um since pre-industrial and industrial levels so that gives you the context of where we are what kind of world we currently live in um the other before i move on to the resources i wanted to emphasize there's a real inequality and disparity linked to this as well so um this is from oxfam and it's sort of almost like a champagne glass and it shows that disproportionately the richest people in the world so the 10 top 10 percent of richest people in the world actually emit the largest almost 50 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and so it's the richest people in the world will have to have the biggest shift in their lifestyles and actually there's possibly the largest proportion of people in the world that would be able to to emit more and i think that's a good context for for the way that you might approach it in schools um sorry this is then the keeling curve and it shows you then the um the historical cycles from interglacial to glacial and then it gives you the context of where we are now above 416 parts per million and and part of this is then to emphasize that urgency and the idea that we we really cannot wait that it there needs to be momentum from educators particularly from a grassroots level and from the bottom up to user initiative to then bring these issues into the classroom and so one of the things that we then did was think okay let's have a look in the uk at what is currently taught and so at the age of 15 16 students um have external examinations that they have to take there are explicit schemes of work and i know this is mirrored then in other countries around europe and so we looked at things like the sciences and um what we did is is carried out something of a an analysis to score these syllabus and work out which of them and you can see in this diagram here is actually biology that best addressed the climate and ecological emergency and then closely followed behind was something like geography and it may be that social sciences or something as similar in your context but it was the sciences in particular that were um addressing these but there was a deficit with all of them that none of them addressed it particularly well and that's um of all the subjects there were only maybe three potentially four that actually looked at it um this then gives you a bit of an idea of the words that we were exploring so things like climate change global warming deforestation and it did show that some subjects were particularly good at including words like carbon dioxide um or um things like geography looking at climate change but there was still this massive gap in terms of a lack of this kind of vocabulary in what was expected to be taught and i think it's important that this is a good indicator then of the emphasis that is applied in these in these resources or in these schemes of work and in the syllabus and it will direct what teachers do and therefore it means that in the practical sense of the day-to-day classroom it may well mean that there's a lack of discussion about climate change because it's simply missing from the the um syllabuses um the other thing we wanted to pick out when we looked at this was we realized that the language um and the grammar of the way that the uh content was included was not particularly good and actually it was detrimental so it talked about things like many scientists believe that human activities will cause the temperature and so this idea that there's um the kind of misrepresentation of the consensus that now and there is almost 100 percent of scientific evidence which suggests climate change is man-made or human induced and that's missing from lots of this also this idea that it's um about future impacts and the idea that actually it's not here and now and so it's important that um we bring that sense of the here and now um I think there's another one here that um this this was from a chemistry syllabus and it said the problems caused by increased levels of air pollutants require scientists and engineers to develop solutions that help to reduce the impact on human activity and what it was doing is inadvertently it's it's prioritizing and emphasizing this idea of a techno fix and possibly that creates the wrong dynamic as well so these are again other problems that we identified within the way that it was already being taught so what we did is we we sort of um crowdsourced um about 14 questions that we thought were fundamental um and then put them together as a um scheme of work or a syllabus and what I'll do is I'll share a link to these resources so these are sort of open source um and what I would also say is they're ongoing in the sense that please do if there's something in there that you think could be improved do share that as well um yeah so here's the link as well um and what I'll do is I'll just spend a few minutes talking through some of what I think are the fundamentals and the key components of this and the idea is this is to try and um to sort of inspire you and to enthuse you to then maybe take some of the resources so the idea is even though so it's a series of 14 lessons but they don't have to be taught consecutively they don't actually have to be taught as a whole lesson you could take an element of it and and and I hope you'll also find that that this is a really good combination of some of the best diagrams and images and and sort of online resources so it may be that you pull some of those out and use them because also um as has been sort of spoken before it depends on your context so it may be that you struggle to find the time to go to fit this in or you cannot you need to be sort of creative almost in order to um uh include this okay so yeah what I'd say is we've uh shared this through lots of social media you know and we've had about 5000 downloads or more than and and there's definitely um a big desire for these sorts of resources um people are keen to include this and to to have this sort of an inspiration so fundamentally what underpins this is a very scientific approach and the first lesson is all about understanding the current fact so what is it that scientists understand and and clarifying that for students so that then you move from the science to then the more open-ended discussion and thinking about then the societal and and the broader questions the also the idea is to to really head on challenge a lot of those misconceptions so often students have quite a confused understanding of the mechanics of climate change um a good example is maybe this association with ozone and the holes in the ozone layer that people get confused then with the kind of the dynamic with climate change and then I would also say that there's the idea of open discussion and critical debate that this is not about brainwashing children or um having one particular um line of argument that you're you're saying students have to believe and so by opening up these sorts of facts and arguments you then create in the classroom um the environment that feels safe for students that they can then ask questions um and debate these sorts of ideas but the other thing as well is um being open to discussion of system change and particularly then thinking about capitalism and neoliberalism and the idea of the current economics uh circumstances and situations and the way businesses and politics run I think in this school you that should be felt like it's an open environment in order to question and to talk about those and what are the alternatives um as well as then the urgency um and and also then bringing in the natural world so there's a good example linked to that um so these are some examples of some of the questions that lead the lessons the lessons have an inquiry approach it's about the students sort of going and finding out this knowledge themselves having explored certain resources um some of the ones I quite like are could we plant trees to solve climate change I know that in the UK a lot of the media has been pushing this as oh it's a silver bullet that we can just plant trees um to um to solve this um also then thinking about population because often population is then closely linked to this and people are saying well we need to cap population well is that true is it maybe more to do with the lifestyle of people um okay um this is a one I particularly enjoy so linking the idea of the natural world um this is taking the students outside of the classroom which again I think is a fundamental opportunity for this type of learning is to say let's let's put students in um an alternative setting so they might often just stay in a classroom but take them outside and then this is a very simple activity to measure the height of the tree and then also it's a conference and then using some quite simple maths and again that's bringing in another skill developing some math skills to then work out how much carbon is locked away in that tree and then you can use that to calculate how many trees would I need to plant to then offset my carbon emissions in a year and then you can scale it up to another country or or to the world and you start to realize or students then realize well actually are there certain limitations to this that how quickly will we run out of land in order to plant new trees that ultimately need maybe a hundred years to grow to their full height anyway um this is another one then comparing countries and and this activity gets students to explore the numbers so the idea is this is incorporates really up to date key statistics and then students can explore this is again a bit of a misconceptions one because often particularly between China and the USA students get confused which is the the largest polluter which one emits the most carbon dioxide and then that relationship between population and is it does it depend on the number of people you've got or the the the the type of economy so there's there's some really interesting threads that can be explored through that this is another really good interactive resource and and within these materials there's quite a few linked like this and this is a live feed of energy data from countries across the world and it allows you to look at the carbon intensity as well as the amounts of energy that countries are emitting and so again it's about bringing students this up-to-date current knowledge and also in a kind of interesting um an interactive sense as well and one of the other things we did was we set up something called an ignorance test and and this was almost inspired by the Gapminder Foundation and the factfulness book where they have their own um factfulness or Gapminder ignorance test and this had uh 20 questions that were multiple choice and I'll quickly link it this in um into the chat so that you can see this and what I'm just going to do is highlight some of the questions that I thought particularly interesting and this has had now um is it maybe so there's the link climate change ignorance test I think it's had more than one and a half yeah 1,678 people have responded to this average score 13 13 and a half out of 20 I think that that's pretty good I would say that that's climate change potentially is one of those issues that people have just through the media picks up a pretty good understanding but what it is is there are some of those finer details that are actually fundamental to solving this and to really getting to grips with it that we need to work on um this is also an interesting one that you could challenge your whole school community um and we we've done that we've uh we we sent it out to all our parents to all the staff and then it was something that students were talking with their teacher and with their parents you know what school did you get what did you think about this question and that in itself led to lots of really interesting discussions um so here's an example of some of the questions climate change has only occurred in the last 140 years what that one does is it really gets you to think about the semantics so this language of climate change are we talking about um anthropogenic or human induced climate change or are we talking about what's been going on over um you know hundreds of thousands of years um how many deaths attributed to climate change again yeah well potentially is it under reported you know where does that number come from um but the idea is the scale of difference there is it 1,500 or is it 150,000 it gets people to think about the scale of the problem the the the true figure at the moment is 150,000 but i would i would bet to say that that's an underrepresentation um we've got the what percentage of scientific evidence you know is it 50-50 because often still in um in the media climate change is presented as one of those or we need to give a balanced argument well the reality is the scientific evidence that 98 percent or even now maybe 100 percent of scientific evidence suggests that climate change is human induced and therefore why have it as a balanced argument you don't need someone who's a climate skeptic because that would be a disproportionate that would be an imbalance of the argument um then you've then got this link with maybe air quality and thinking about um environmental problems um in the uk 40,000 people die prematurely due to poor air quality people often um you know don't understand that scale they often under kind of under estimated and then that last one each day the world burns 100 million barrels of oil it's true and again it's something that people just don't think about the to do with the lifestyle and consumption um just such a high figure okay so that's a really interesting one that then was an opportunity to engage students in the wider community um thinking a bit more create creatively again this idea of connecting students with nature we've got them one of the lessons takes the students outside and then they perform some poetry they read some poems and then that gets them to reflect so the idea is to think about their relationship with nature and and how much space we give for nature is part of this as well so i guess it goes a bit broader than just climate change um ultimately though it culminates in a debate um again quite a controlled situation and um the the scheme of work sets it up so that students take particular perspective so you kind of go from a spectrum of being climate skeptic to maybe someone who's more neutral or undecided and then you've got the more radical activist at the other end and the idea is students then debate this of um the the motion that we use is this house believes radical action is needed to tackle irreversible climate change and there's lots in that you know that wording of irreversible the idea of radical action is lots there that students can discuss and the the idea is that um they take the knowledge they've learned from that scheme of work and and it culminates in in that sort of debate um so just then just to finish off there's to support these materials what we did is we recorded some videos that help explain some of the kind of meta explanation and the reasoning behind the activities and how to implement them properly so there's a whole youtube playlist linked to this with with um kind of how-to's almost so the idea is that these lessons can be picked up by anyone and and kind of quickly understood um we also tried to engage parents because what i would say is that i see the school environment as an opportunity to engage with a much bigger community so we set up an evening where parents were invited in and then we gave them a taster of some of the lessons that we um we give to the students so they had to go at some of the activities and it was an opportunity to um to challenge their perception of what school is like and hopefully try and expose them to some of the more innovative and creative activities but also to update their climate change knowledge so i think often it's the parents who who um are lacking there's a bit of a gap in in terms of their knowledge um so here's an example of how we use the warming stripes we've sort of put them as a banner across the back of the classroom and the idea is then that they're always present these are for the uk and it goes from 1850 to the present day um so there's lots of opportunities to be able to use the sort of imagery um and the graphs just within the classroom environment and with the educational setting um this is um uh kind of a collation of lots of resources so there is also you know what i would say there's lots of really good stuff particularly there's some books that this scheme of work was based on that would be useful for anyone to read or for to encourage students to read and particularly there's that one there it's called there is no planet b um and yes i wanted to just finish with that graph just to emphasize the urgency and to say look we are in such unprecedented and different times and therefore we should feel this sort of need to to um to be as radical and and kind of to bring the change to our classroom as much as possible so yes sorry there was one last quote to finish with it's this statement that you know if teachers were teaching climate change right would we be in the situation we're in at the moment and though um education and teachers can't solve every problem they're an important part of that and i think it's important for students for teachers sorry to realize that so for teachers to understand the the position they're in and to realize that they they really need to communicate the urgency discuss the potential of system change and encourage an imagination and a positive future so that students understand how they can make the world but also themselves happier and healthier so fundamentally to this scheme of work is the idea that we can both improve the health of the planet but also ourselves and i think that's where i finish yes thank you very much for thank you very much i will like to give some uh minutes to our participants to rip down any other question they might have for either for you for cata but uh somebody already asked how did the parents respond were they really involved it was a question for paul the the parents were really positive and they appreciated themselves that they didn't know the up-to-date knowledge and they were really keen to come in and just to have that update of what is the current science what do we currently know and what is it that you're teaching my child i think also what came through is that lots of the activities um encourage students to engage in conversation with their parents or with their other people and and that was something that that came through across the whole scheme of work was that um they were then having conversations much broader um it's perhaps the something that personally i would like to know uh um if this is uh this is something that both sukyara might want to uh to reply to um the same question about how uh the parents responded to the project uh you were involved uh into with the italian climate change yeah um we had only positive feedback we don't have um direct interactions with the parents because we deliver these lessons directly in school so we deal mainly with teachers but of course the activities are coordinated with the families and they are aware that the uh they are receiving these lessons and again the feedback that we had so far was only positive and actually um especially after uh the attention that fiders for future received there is an even more urgent request from uh parents schools and teachers to receive to have the tools and receive the kind and provided a kind of education that that the kid needs on on these topics so absolutely positive yes and at the beginning of your presentation we had a participant asking you more of a practical question so how my school can participate in in your project is it an italian student and is the question for me i'm assuming that i'm just yes um the this um um if that is a student uh that is asking a question you mean the students might talk with one of their teachers i'm coordinating a request that they just need to write to the email that there was at the end of my um presentation that is the school at italiaclima.org but i'm going as soon as my laptop becomes back to normal i'll make sure to provide you that contact and then we move forward from their taking agreements uh directly with the school on the time that is available and the kind of lesson that you would prefer to um to provide to be provided and we make sure to come to your school and uh and we deliver the lesson and the same applies for teachers if a teacher wants to provide this kind of uh knowledge to their students they can contact us directly and we move we move from there yes here we are for everybody who were um asking that question here uh here is a slide with italian clowning network contact i'm just taking the chat box to see if we have more questions coming in with both of you and uh just a second there are so many uh participants right now that's my chat box has freeze but um um in the meantime i would like to uh ask you to a question i would really like to understand um if you uh in in both of your experiences uh how did you perceive the the the change in the initial uh attitude of the kids to the students you you're working you're working with and how their attitude uh is changing after i'm happy to go first um yeah thank you both i i think that what i've experienced teaching this is that students often think they already know it all that that um climate change is something that is discussed so frequently and is on uh in the news so much now that that they almost feel overwhelmed or that all the conversation has already been had or they often which is also the slightly scary response is they feel powerless and that they almost feel resigned to a fate and what i found is teaching in this way actually gives them much more hope and that it um what it does is it gives them the knowledge and the skills and the ability to think a bit more critically and to to feel empowered to then have that hope so that's been a big difference for me um i had the summer following up on what Rob just said um yes so we we found um something similar at times depending on the kind of school and the the kind of students crowd that we were having but and yes also in our experience in Italy we can say that there are um students really expressing their feelings where like this is too big what can i do with my small actions and so on and especially what do they tend to ask is also what can i study what can i do what are the what is the path i can follow to contribute in some way uh to solving this problem so we always explain that it's important to have some personal changes in the personal lifestyle of course that that is not the only thing that they they should do and it's not enough in general that a systemic change is needed and if that is one they want to achieve and they want to contribute to that actually there is so much that can be done around climate change we especially we stress what we what we stress especially is the fact that that they don't need to necessarily become an engineer or to um go toward a scientific path to contribute to the fight against climate change but they can work and go in in education communication information they we always stress our activities at the corpus so advocacy civil society engagement and we also stress that there is a lot that can be done also at the local level in their community so they can contribute also to work there and we always trust that in them that usually politicians so that are those that take the decisions tends to make their political agenda you know to put in their agenda as a top priority something that they think people cares about so it's important for we encourage them to be active citizens to inform themselves to be interested also in politics in us in order to to shape their own ideas of course and have an impact in the in the in the rural communities and and beyond if they have any desire of going towards an international career and we always bring our team as an example as we in italian summer network we are a group of people with the most different backgrounds and we are a good example of what can be done from young people and this tends to lift their spirits and let them know that there are solutions there we need to just push forward from that thank you very much i think there was just one last question and this for Chiara our guidelines provided by the united nation under education for sustainable development useful in developing curriculum to teach about climate change that is actually a really good question we didn't take the un approach in the sense that we of course talk also about the sustainable development goals in our lessons but we didn't take necessary the kind of you know communication that they have but we do teach of course the intersectionality and the inter correlation that there are between all these topics as i stressed several times during the presentation this is also a particular question as italy there was an announcement last year about italy becoming the first country in the world to integrate permanently some sustainable development education in the curriculum so and that was announced by our minister fiora monti and fiora monti wanted to really to replicate the sbg's structure he really wanted to use the un approach that unfortunately in the meantime there has been a change of government and there's been the covid situation so we don't have news on how this initiative is moving forward but it's something that of course we would welcome as italian government worker is delivering this educational project as i said before to fill a gap that we do hope is not going to exist anymore in italian schools and educational programs