Green GUARDens: Environmental Sustainability and Green Entrepreneurship Competence-Building in Kindergartens

Green GUARDens: Environmental Sustainability and Green Entrepreneurship Competence-Building in Kindergartens is an Erasmus Plus project which targets kindergarten teachers and their students (3.5 to 6 years old), including those who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH).

The urgency of global climate change requires the redefinition of interdisciplinary educational goals and contents in school curricula related to green entrepreneurship education and sustainable development.

Using the framework of the UN’s goals for sustainable development (SDGs), the Green GUARDens project ensures that kindergartens become more sustainable and that teachers serve as role models, demonstrating greener behaviours to their students through formal education that utilises experiential and gamified learning to enhance this experience.

Objectives 

The overarching goals of the project are three-fold:

1) To cultivate an understanding of environmental sustainability, while fostering the development of young environmentally conscious citizens.

2) To foster the democratisation of climate action by engaging children, including Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing students in the process.

3) To take environmental sustainability and green entrepreneurship education a step further, by approaching kindergartens as enterprises with Corporate Social Responsibility rather than merely educational institutions.

Project results

The Green GUARDens project will develop:

1) A Virtual Learning Lab for teachers’ training, containing theoretical modules interactive multimedia resources, and micro-challenges on environmental sustainability, green entrepreneurship, and inclusion and accessibility for Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing in education.

The Virtual Learning Lab will help teachers develop sustainability and entrepreneurship competencies, as well as understand ways to make their kindergartens greener.

2) Pedagogical Sequences with gamified activities and little experiments based on ocean pollution, air pollution, and deforestation for teachers to adapt in their classrooms.

3) The ‘Green GUARDens of the Future’ Audiovisual Implementation Report with practical reporting, best practices, and audiovisual recordings with recommendations and awareness raising on adopting the project’s methodology in kindergarten classrooms.

Project website: https://greenguardens.com/the-project/