Schools Go Green with Synapses Academies – Summer School 2024

AI (Co-Pilot) generated image from a Green School

The Schools Go Green with the SYNAPSES summer school is part of the international professional development opportunities provided by the European School Innovation Academy (ESIA). The SYNAPSES Academy is part of the International Erasmus+ School Heads and Teacher Training Academy on Teaching for Sustainability Citizenship. 

The academy’s main aim is to present a vision of how pre-service and in-service programs on teaching for Sustainability Citizenship (SC) could be interrelated and enriched to develop a joint offer with a significant European dimension. SC has great potential for cultivating agents of change who not only envision but also enact solutions to climate change. Teaching for SC can stimulate and lead to action including decreasing consumption and demand, developing sustainable food and energy sources, exploring nature-based solutions for the current challenges, using school buildings as teaching tools, and greening schoolyards. Arguing for a paradigm shift in the way we view education, the SYNAPSES Academy could demonstrate how our education systems can create new levels of awareness and work towards a sustainable future.

In the framework of the SYNAPSES Academy, a series of training activities (at local, regional, national and international levels) are organised to help teachers design the most effective and engaging lessons that will make use of innovative forms of instruction (inquiry-based, project-based, challenge-based) and tools (e.g., access to rich scientific data archives, virtual and remote experimentations, animations) in their classrooms, and more generally think differently about their students’ learning of and about the environment, science and technology. This is expanded by offering concurrently opportunities for mobilities, such as study visits, job shadowing opportunities, meetings, conferences, contests and competitions with the goal of enabling the Academy to become a forum for the exchange of knowledge, and an information hub which will support the, develop and promote:

• the development and enrichment of educational activities or events with emphasis on environmental education, but also innovative and effective forms of instruction (e.g., IBSE and PBL) and other learning strategies for all subjects related to sustainability, climate change and environmental education.
• the integration and coordination of educational activities between all stakeholder groups across different disciplines, regions and cultures.
• programs, events, activities, and organisations that promote and provide means and tools for environmental education to collect and identify best practices and outcomes.
• the scientific community and entities interested in environmental educational activities

The SYNAPSES Summer School is designed for school heads and teachers of both primary and secondary schools. The objective of this combination is to build school heads’ leadership interventions and teachers’ competencies and skills as well as to stimulate teacher motivation on up-taking innovative teaching methods, subjects, and practices to enrich and renew the school’s curriculum to increase students’ interest in sustainability, environmental studies, science, on how science is made and how climate change affects every-day life.

Context of Implementation:

This Journey will be a travel companion during the SYNAPSES Academy providing all necessary information for a smooth navigation throughout the various materials and challenges presented during the week.