CircularCityChallenge

Circularity is a crucial part of a sustainable society, yet schools struggle to convey the knowledge and skills increasingly required to shape this future. The CircularCityChallenge project designed a comprehensive online platform to encourage teachers’s and students’ engagement with the circular economy. A project-based teaching approach is designed to facilitate sustainable teaching and to equip the young generation with the knowledge, skills and networks urgently needed to take part in the green and fair transition.

Step-by-step guidebooks

The CircularCityChallenge platform provides vast resources to easily grasp principles of circularity, find inspiration and develop interventions with real impact. As the central resource for conveying the CircularCityChallenge method, appealing and comprehensive step-by-step guides were developed. Both students and facilitators are guided through six steps easy to realise: 1) Circular economy in a nutshell, 2) Identify the challenge, 3) Understand your power, 4) Envision circular futures, 5) Develop your initiatives and 6) Share your ideas. The steps encourage the youth to engage with their local environments and address resource waste directly. Systems thinking allows students to identify relevant actors as well as their potential impact on the system. The guidebooks are designed in an appealing and illustrative way, can be used digitally and in a printed format and are translated to all consortium languages to minimise language barriers for the users.

Further online tools

For each step, the platform links to external multimedia resources, providing further inputs and examples. 29 resources in the format of videos, comics, books and more have been provided for students and facilitators initially and are continuously expanded with the newest online tools and resources. A submission module allows participants of the contest pilot (2023-2024) to easily share their ideas with the world. The inspiration section of the platform is dedicated to inspiring the users through video examples and online collections of already successfully implemented circular projects.

Overall, the platform encourages educators and students alike to engage deeply with circularity as a key pillar of sustainability and to share their vision by participating in the contest. The developed tools can be used in the context of the contest as well as independently from it, by students with facilitators or without. Through its flexible format, the platform resources can be integrated into a variety of education contexts – homework, workshops, excursions, project weeks, after-school care and more.

The future of circularity education

With the matter of sustainability and circular economy being complex and dynamic, many school systems and teachers struggle to keep up with teaching what is relevant and up-to-date. The CircularCityChallenge aims to support the transformation of school curricula, to support teachers, and to support the next generation to shape the green and fair transition and to be ready for the jobs of the future.

Links

Project Platform: https://circularcitychallenge.eu/

Project Website: https://project.circularcitychallenge.eu/

Keywords

Circular Economy, Participation, Youth Empowerment, Sustainability Education, Education Platform, Online Learning Tools, Systems Thinking, Action-Based Learning