Description
Living in global environmental crises, eco-anxiety is a rapidly growing phenomenon among children and young people.
This poses a new challenge to educators: How to deal with different emotions and attitudes towards environmental issues? How to support kids and young people emotionally during times of climate disruption and turmoil? Many educators may hesitate if they have enough competencies and skills to address such a demanding topic.
This course aims to enhance educators’ capacity and competencies to address eco-anxiety among young people. The course starts with different activities for you to reflect on your environmental emotions and relationship to nature.
You will then learn and experience how creative exercises can be used for addressing environmental issues, such as creative writing, drawing, and movement.
As emotions empower people to strive to bring influence and to deal with strong emotions, one of the best ways is to use them as fuel for taking concrete environmental actions. Therefore, this course also aims to help you discover ways to encourage young people to take action and make impacts on environmental issues.
Last but not least, educators have an important task to cultivate hope and meaningfulness in the young generation, despite crisis.
Thus, you will explore and practice some useful strategies and tools to maintain and cultivate hope, which can be seen as a key element to survival and resilience.
Once you open the door of hope toward the future, you will discover many more possibilities to support your students’ emotional processes and develop their emotional resilience.
By the end of the course, you will be able to address the environmental issues through three perspectives: emotions, actions, and hope.
You will strengthen your skills to acknowledge environmental emotions in yourselves and your students. You will also take away a toolbox of creative ways to work with emotions related to environmental issues.
You will develop the capacity to support your students to be active and hopeful towards the future, despite the global environmental crisis.
What is included
Learning outcomes
The course will help the participants to:
- Gain information about environmental emotions;
- Strengthen skills as an environmental educator to face different eco-emotions;
- Reflect own emotions toward environmental issues;
- Practise to use of creative methods as part of environmental education;
- Building competencies needed in environmental education.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Course introduction
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools.
Introduction to the topic
- The environment and emotions in us.
Day 2 – Environmental emotions
- What are eco-emotions? Why do they matter?;
- Emotional skills, dealing with different eco-emotions;
- Creative Workshop 1: exercises to work with eco-feelings.
Day 3 – Taking action
- What can be done?;
- My Action Venn diagram;
- Creative Workshop 2: exercises to address the ways that everyone can make a difference.
Day 4 – Cultivating and maintaining hope
- The power of hope;
- Meaning-focused coping, three climate emotions coping strategies;
- Creative Workshop 3: exercises in nature, visit an outdoor green place.
Day 5 – Looking to the future
- Creating your own vision board;
- Reflection of the week.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion.
- Awarding of the course Certificate of Attendance.
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.
