Pedagogical model for teacher education on climate change within the European CLIMADEMY project

The present work is framed within CLIMADEMY (Climate Change Teachers’ Academy), a three-year Erasmus+ project started in June 2022, coordinated by the University of Crete, involving six further partners and two associated partners (https://climademy.eu/). The CLIMADEMY project is developing a comprehensive training framework for in-service and pre-service teachers to support them in understanding Climate Change drivers and impacts, mitigation and adaptation actions, and to promote their efficiency in teaching and learning about Climate Change. The project is part of a new Erasmus + action whose scope is to build teacher education European networks and share novel and efficient teaching methodologies to regenerate the education of the next generation of European citizens. This work thesis contributed to work package three of the project. Specifically, it contributed to developing the pedagogical model for teacher education on Climate Change to be used as a reference framework in the training activities. This model is supposed to play two roles in teacher education. Firstly, the pedagogical model is expected to orient the partners and the teacher trainers to convey, besides the scientific contents, tools and knowledge developed in science education research. Secondly, the pedagogical model is expected to provide the “pedagogical identity” to the activities on Climate Change designed or adapted within CLIMADEMY in the hubs. In this thesis, I present a study of teachers’ needs in teaching Climate Change using three different data collection contexts. Then, I illustrate the developing process of the pedagogical model, underlining my role in analysing the research theoretical frameworks, extracting the key messages to convey to teachers, and designing a template to present, discuss or analyse training activities. Finally, I describe two activities for teacher education on Climate Change and illustrate how these activities can exemplify the pedagogical model.