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Science and Climate Change in Latin America: Educating for a Better Future (CSIELO)
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Challenge
Ecuador, while rich in biodiversity across diverse climates and ecosystems, is highly vulnerable to climate change. This vulnerability significantly impacts its crucial agricultural sector, which provides food, raw materials, and job opportunities. At the same time, agriculture is also the country’s third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, worsening climate risks. Ecuador’s high vulnerability and low readiness for climate adaptation highlight the need for investment and innovation, including in social readiness and education. The National Adaptation Plan (2023-2027) seeks to boost agriculture's sustainability and resilience, but this requires a workforce with “green skills”. However, many teachers lack the training and knowledge to teach sustainable development effectively and impart these skills.
Goals
Strengthen the knowledge and skills of agriculture and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers to integrate climate change, biodiversity and gender-responsiveness in their subjects through continuous professional development and access to contextualised, validated teaching and learning support materials.
Project Partners
Government of Ecuador, through:
Approach
CSIELO expands upon VVOB’s Climate and Environment Integrated in Agro-Learning project (CAMBIAR), adding a specific focus on strengthening teachers’ scientific understanding of climate change. This regional project is being implemented as part of the ALEC (Latin America for Climate Education) programme. VVOB coordinates the programme in Ecuador with the Ministry of Education, Sports, and Culture and the OCE.
The project is built around three pillars:
- Creation, contextualisation and validation of teaching and learning resource materials through human-centred design processes involving upper secondary agriculture and STEM teachers, climate scientists, subject matter experts, CSOs and government officials. This pillar includes the development of a teaching guide that integrates updated concepts and data on climate change, land use, agriculture, and biodiversity in Ecuador, and incorporates gender and intersectionality as cross-cutting topics.
- In-person and online teacher professional development, to strengthen teachers’ scientific understanding of climate change and enhance their pedagogical skills for implementing climate education in a practical, gender-responsive way.
- Monitoring, evaluation and learning, through school visits, pre- and post-training surveys, and feedback loops.
By the end of the programme
- Teaching and learning support materials, together with a contextualised teaching guide on climate education, will be validated by the Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture and made available to teachers in upper secondary technical education.
- Thirty-five teacher trainers will be equipped to deliver high quality continuous professional development (CPD) for climate education.
- At least 90 upper secondary agriculture and STEM teachers will have benefited from CPD. At least 80% will have improved knowledge and pedagogical skills, and at least 60% of them will have implemented climate education in their classroom.
- Climate education will be more deeply institutionalised within the national education system, contributing to the sustainability of the project results.