WEATHER REPORT. In Toulouse, teachers exempted from teaching climate change
Founded by Météo France, the Office for Climate Education (OCE) is organizing its first summer school on climate change education in the pink city. Objective: to give volunteer teachers keys to better deal with this theme at school.
This time, it is the teachers who are behind the desks. They are thirty, from twelve European countries. For a week in Toulouse, they benefit from free training, delivered in English by trainers from the Office for Climate Education (OCE), researchers, doctoral students, engineers and mediators.
New students for the week, these teachers are all very focused. Because climate change is complex and often a source of anxiety for their students, especially since the subject does not appear in the school curriculum before high school.
One of the workshops proposes to review the emotions felt by the younger generations when faced with a planetary issue, using emojis modeling these feelings. An active pedagogy, which aims to give teachers tools to better understand it.
“The last part of the workshop is to focus on the solutions“, specifies Mathilde Tricoire, educational manager for the OCE. “What can we do as an individual, let society do its thing, and finally, what can we put in place in the establishment.“
The teachers can then present, in turn, the projects they have been able to set up in class. A teacher at the Edmond Rostand college in Les Herbiers (Vendée), Olivier Girard explained last year the consequences of global warming on the oceans. “We are now working on the question of the forest, on the whole of the wood sector“, he explains.
In this makeshift classroom on the Météo France campus, there is a conviction: that the value of the conscience of the younger generations can come from teaching at school, an ideal place for the transmission of values.
And a goal, to fight against the eco-anxiety of young students by providing them with enough resources to allow them to act on their scale.
“Through this university, by working with teachers to create new educational materials on a European scale, we act on this lever“, underlines Roland Séférian, climatologist at the research center of Météo France.
The summer school will end on July 22. “The idea is to accelerate action and the implementation of ambitious measures, when they come from the public authorities“, concluded Roland Séférian.