Climate Change: Doing Little Can Change a Lot! Children’s Knowledge-Action About Cimate Principles and Effects

Abstract

Climate principles understanding among childhood and primary school students is critical for effective climate change adaptation measures. Climate change communication and education (CCCE) is now considerably implemented in primary school, less frequently in kindergartens, but two key open questions persist: What nature of knowledge is proper for young children? Who should be involved in the basis of climate change communication and education? Here, we explore how interdisciplinary participatory research and mutual learning processes using cross-areas in curriculum, hands-on activities, and everyday life routines, contribute for improving knowledge about climate principles and effects, and provide children decision-making skills for acting. The ordinary questions and expressions “What is climate?”, “What is greenhouse effect?”, “Why is climate changing?”, “Which problems are caused by greenhouse gas emissions?”, “How can each one of us look after the Earth?”, and “How doing a little can change a lot?”, provided the baseline for the research approach between children, teachers, and academics. Our theoretical framework and participatory research approach also reflect authors that have worked about social aspects of cognitive development of children, namely John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev S. Vygotsky, Loris Malaguzzi, and Paulo Freire. The research design involved the selection-[re]construction of 14 activities, explored in-and-out-of classroom according to the age and level of knowledge of children. A total of 320 children between 3 and 10-years-old from two kindergartens and two primary schools have joined the collaborative project “Let’s look after the Earth: doing a little can change a lot!”. Children’s knowledge and actions pinpoint aspects of CCCE that are not generally experienced in curricula, and the misunderstanding of climate principles and effects that are often overlooked in school. Our approach highlight how mutual learning involving academy with school contribute to climate literacy in childhood and primary school, and, directly-and-indirectly, the adaptation to new teaching-learning practices, and the involvement of children families in CCCE. Young children conceive themselves as active contributors to society, using their knowledge and life experiences to understand, be engaged and act; we discuss knowledge-action behaviours in CCCE through drawings and perceptions of children. A questionnaire to children and teachers pinpoints similar behaviours about everyday life routines independently the age or school. Finally, we underline the opportunity of interdisciplinary associated to formal and non-formal education to engage multiple actors in active teaching and learning processes towards new directions to knowledge-action models in CCCE. We feel particularly privileged that our interdisciplinary approach academy-school reached out to other audiences as well as to its publication in book, with children as our main contributors, representing the beginning of the collection Discovering Science [Descobrir as Ciências] by Coimbra University Press.