PoET projekt leírása

There is a growing number of projects addressing environmental issues, plus a growing need for improving the sustainability practices of the projects. On the other, there are not many educators that have the competencies to deliver high-quality training on these topics. With the EU Green Strategy for E+/ESC in the making, the number of green projects will have to increase even more, so the demand for educators qualified in green competencies development is likely to rise significantly.

With this project, we aim to increase the number of ecotrainers available. We want to do this by designing a path for educators to develop green competencies (their own and of the people they work with), by creating a pool of ecotrainers (PoET) that support each other's life-long professional development, by creating an online platform (website) with green educational resources, by initiating cross-sectoral cooperation on green competences development, and by developing a green competences self-assessment tool. In order to guarantee the sustainability of the resources that we will be creating, an objective of this project is to develop capacity within the partner organisations to maintain the website, the PoET and the self-assessment tool, as well as to learn the basics of podcasting, in order to have the skills to promote this and other future projects.

Another strong motivation is that when we (the leaders of the partner organisations) attended the EPLM conference last year (a conference organised by the EU-Council of Europe Youth Partnership, on the topic of “Learning how to be more sustainable in mobility projects”, the GreenComp (European Sustainability competence framework) was presented, and in the debate that followed, almost everyone who intervened pointed out that, while the document was very well done, very necessary and very welcome, there was a big need to “translate” it to actionable terms, in other words, to create resources or materials to help practitioners put the framework into practice, hence our project subtitle of Green Comp in practice.

The concrete objectives of this project are:

To design a clear path that educators can follow in order to become competent in delivering environmental education and developing green competences;
To create and promote a pool of credible and high-level professional ecotrainers (PoETs);
To compile old and new resources for teaching green competences and make them available on a free, accessible and inclusive website;
To develop a tool to assess one’s own degree of ecoliteracy;
To initiate cross-sectoral cooperation on green competences development;
To increase the capacity of the implementing partner organisations, by developing their digital competencies in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.

Through the above-mentioned objectives of this project, we want to do that and so much more.
Other reasons:
- To become part of a community of professionals where environmental education is essential and its members eager to improve and support each other in their professional development;
- To fill the gap of knowledge and practice on how to integrate the Green Comp framework in educational processes - also ours, the partner organisations of this project, as our teams include non-formal education trainers;

We strongly believe that non-formal education plays a key role in helping people understand the reality and workings of our environmental surroundings, the unprecedented crisis we are in, and to design solutions where education is paramount. The resources that we will be compiling are based on non-formal education.