At VVOB, we believe that education has a key role to play in climate action. Quality climate change education can support us to deal with effects of climate change, transform our relationship with nature and collectively call upon governments to take responsibility.
But here’s the challenge: while most teachers believe it’s important to teach about climate change, only a small minority feels confident to do so. That is exactly what we at VVOB, together with South-African government partners, want to change with our Keep it Cool project. In South Africa, there is a high level of political will to address climate change. However, there is a great need to develop the necessary skills and agency.
Curriculum activated climate change projects are initiatives that use the curriculum as a tool for real-world change in South Africa's "Keep it Cool" climate change education project. These projects involve students and communities in implementing solutions to local climate challenges, supported by professional development for teachers and school leaders. The projects aim to build resilience and combating climate change effects.
Almost 400 teachers have initiated climate action projects in their schools, such as food gardens, planting trees, waste collection… They involved the surrounding community: community members were providing seedlings to the school, or weeding the gardens during weekends. In turn, communities benefited from these project for example through waste collection practices and vegetable production. As a school leader explained: “It is not just a climate change project, but something that is keeping our kids in school”.
We work together with the Department of Basic Education and the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment to select schools to be involved in the project, and to prepare for scaling up the project more broadly in their provinces and beyond. The district officials play a key role in this. We already notice that there is more demand than what we can support through our project, and districts are looking into creative ways of supporting teachers beyond the project.
Compared to the first group of teachers we trained, we have redeveloped the materials for more engaging online learning. Next to this, instead of working with university lecturers, we have chosen to work with district officials of the Department of Basic Education to ensure the training reaches as many teachers and school leaders as possible. As for the selection of schools, based on results of the end-term evaluation of the first implementation, we have deliberately selected schools with a lower socio-economic status as they experienced a greater positive impact from the project. We have also included a more significant component for school leaders in the trajectory, to support their teachers in setting up a curriculum-activated change project.
A key focus of this renewed approach is the explicit integration of Life Orientation (LO). We see LO as the powerful catalyst for building resilient and responsible citizens ready to face the climate crisis. This subject provides the essential ethical framework, emotional literacy, and community action skills necessary for effective climate response.
We don't stop there. We drive cross-curricular collaboration to ensure climate change education is holistic: we explicitly link the scientific understanding of climate change (from subjects like Physical Sciences and Geography) with the critical societal impacts and choices, grounding social responsibility in factual evidence.
As a (South-African) teacher, you can go through the 8 materials of the teachers set on curriculum activated climate change projects. You can join a professional learning community to support you during the experimentation and implementation phase of the change project. At the end of the learning journey, you will submit a portfolio of evidence, and attend a celebration event.
