In the next three years, students and teachers from four European countries will meet on several field trips and joint seminars as part of the "EduChange – making knowledge together – addressing climate change through innovative place based education and blended learning" project. Together, within the framework of cooperation in international teams, they will try to develop innovative teaching materials that can help to improve the quality of teaching about the effects of climate change on our lives.

In the days 18.–25. In March, the first field trip was held in Olomouc as part of the EduChange project. In addition to our students from the departments of development and environmental studies (KRES), geography (KGE) and geoinformatics (KGI) at Palacký University, students and academics from Norway, the Netherlands and Malta also participated. The goal of the project is to look for innovative ways to teach about climate change in a local and global context by learning about its impacts on specific places.

Already on the first field trip to Olomouc, the participants had the task of inventing teaching methods that would be applicable at universities and high schools. The main thing is that the teaching is not about distant and abstract topics, but that they go through examples of imaginable, local impacts! The project is primarily focused on phenomena associated with water, especially extreme precipitation and drought.

Students in mixed teams had the task of creating their own activity, based on classic teaching procedures, movement activities, but also using modern communication technologies that they know from their countries. The different backgrounds of the participants can lead to stimulating discussions, interdisciplinary cooperation and interesting results.

University students and academics will then test their creations on high school students, trying out both the role of a student during the excursion and the role of a teacher on younger colleagues after the excursion. "In May, as part of the EduChange project, we will all fly to Trondheim, where we will present how it worked in secondary schools and start the next round of searching for possible teaching procedures, this time in Malta," said project team member Tomáš Daněk from KRES.

New educational materials freely available to everyone

Project leader Jiří Pánek (also from KRES) appreciates that the project: "brings to our environment a combination of several educational elements that are common at advanced European universities, thus contributing to a comparison of our level with that of the world." All teaching materials and methods developed during the excursions will be published on the Internet and therefore publicly available. Participants will use edu-clips, e-learning platform, multimedia online maps, GeoGames, low-cost methods of mapping the terrain from a height, etc.

The results achieved using the mentioned methods can contribute to diversifying and improving the teaching of geographic and environmental subjects at schools, as well as lectures within the framework of international development studies at Palacký University, where the EduChange project was created. The project was supported within the Erasmus + program.

Text and Photo: Department of Development and Environmental Studies, PřF UP