Results of the survey on climate change to education and vocational training teachers and educators

The main objective of the #me#us#now project is to counteract the effects of climate change in a sustainable and participative way, based on common green values. The project focuses on low-skilled young people aged between 15 and 30 in vocational education and training (VET), and VET professionals across Europe.

The first result of the project was the redaction of a research report based on the findings of a survey, which was directed to VET learners and educators. The survey was meant to collect relevant national information on the target groups to understand their perspective, needs and awareness of on topics such as climate change, sustainability, and their self-efficacy.

A summary of findings from the survey reveals that all Italian educators believe climate change is an urgent issue that affects the entire world and needs to be tackled, and for most of them also something that politicians should take care of. Close to the totality of educators is highly concerned about climate change and feels affected by it.

Surprisingly, apart from TV news (86.7%) as a source of information, a considerable percentage of educators uses social medias to keep updated about climate topics (73.3%), similarly to learners. Moreover, educators showed to be knowledgeable about the SDGs of the United Nations (86.7%), and the ones they affirm to care about the most are Quality education (n.4) and Climate action (n.13). According to Italian educators, the two issues on which action is mostly needed are transports and recycling, followed by the topics related to food and plastics, which were selected by a half of the respondents. 

Furthermore, climate change is a topic spoken on a regular basis only by a minority of educators. Similarly to learners, educators mainly speak about climate change with their friends and families, but, differently, in the third place they indicate their own students (66.7%).  The two phenomena which educators say affect their communities the most are pollution and extreme weather patterns. Regarding the actions to be taken, the respondents seemed inclined to a collective type of action, since more than a half of them would prefer to act with community groups (and, just after that, with their families, friends, colleagues, and political parties).

Considering their teaching activity, even if more than a half of educators (53.4%) includes the topic of climate change in their lessons, only the 40% of them affirms to feel comfortable doing it. The requirements they would need to do it properly would be specific training on climate change topics and reliable information sources. Consistently with these statements, the challenges to overcome to include climate change in teaching are lack of information and lack of support from educational institutions.

The next section was about educators’ ideas on how to incorporate climate change in their teaching. First, the ways through which they would like to learn about them are mostly training events and learning-by-doing. Afterwards, the educators would incorporate them in their teaching through activities such as study visits for the classes and once-off classes, but also by making them core components of a class.

Last, the majority of respondents seemed confident about their ability to have an impact on climate change, and the kinds of support they would need to have it are training material for educators, training material for young people, practical ideas to implement, and groups to connect with. In a similar way, between the contributions to affect climate change they feel they could give, some of the recurring arguments are acting ethically as individuals, being a positive example for students, and studying and disseminating sustainable knowledge.