CircularCityChallenge

The CircularCityChallenge project aims to substantially transform the way sustainability is taught and learned. At the heart of the project lies the pan-European contest launched in Autumn 2023, which empowers secondary school pupils to take action in their local environments. The contest looks for creative interventions for the students’ environments that reduce resource waste through the principles of circularity. The project-based teaching approach is designed to facilitate sustainability teaching and to equip the young generation with the knowledge, skills and networks urgently needed for the green transition.

The Contest

Based on inputs from education experts, university and high school students of the five consortium countries, an innovative teaching approach was developed to enable students to encounter today’s challenges and shape a circular and sustainable future. Today the young generation has little say in the decision-making of their future. The CircularCityChallenge is a chance for teenage students to become agents of change in a world that urgently needs circular solutions. By participating in the challenge, students learn to design fair solutions that reduce waste and pollution, reuse resources, and restore nature.

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 offers an innovative, project-based teaching approach to facilitate sustainability education for teachers and other facilitators. By applying a systems-thinking lens, students can independently and interactively explore the challenges of resource waste and ways to address them. Students can identify circularity players and interlinkages more in depth and thus acquire up-to-date and locally relevant knowledge and skills, preparing them to become experts and decision-makers of the future. At the same time, teachers can educate without the need to become sustainability experts. The contest was designed for students and facilitators to gain new skills, access relevant training, and unlock networking opportunities and is a chance to attend the award ceremony in Vienna and to win great prizes.

The Platform

The contest is accompanied by an education platform, providing vast resources to easily grasp principles of circularity, find inspiration and develop interventions with real impact. As a central resource for conveying the CircularCityChallenge method, appealing and comprehensive step-by-step guides were developed for both students and facilitators. Each of the six steps is easy to realise and complemented by suitable online resources. One 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.

Links

Project Platform: https://circularcitychallenge.eu/

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

Keywords

Circular Economy, Participation, Youth Empowerment, Sustainability Education, Education Platform