Climate education

Climate Education at Otaniemi Upper Secondary School

Education for 350 ppm world

The whole school has been building up new practices for climate education and bringing it into the center of high school studies. The curriculum in Finland allows us to do it. Teachers and students have together found their contradictions and formulated solutions finding their own way to do sustainability education and getting it to the daily life structures of an upper secondary school.

Teachers created theory cards which make visible the sustainability curriculum at upper secondary school level in Finland as one lesson long pieces. The theory cards can also be played against different sustainability frameworks like Agenda 2030 or GreenComp in order to understand the concept of sustainability. This also helps each subject to build up its own sustainability relationship.

Also new environments were created at school in order to foster interdisciplinary activities and enhance co-work with organizations and companies. Grandma’s place with circular economy and handcrafts and Planetary garden with multispecies food production within planetary boundaries are examples of such learning environments.

Green Deal in VR represents another kind of practice. It’s possible to cover wider units of sustainability related issues by doing VR environments. It’s possible to create an adventure where you explore innovative solutions of different cities in order to tackle climate change. It’s even possible to build up future utopias.