Change the Story, Learning to Make a Difference in Climate Crisis "2279

We describe the results of the Italian piloting of Change the Story, a cross-European project that takes an innovative look at climate and citizenship education. The project developed resources to support teachers and pupils in creating digital narratives about the kind of world they want as a response to the climate crisis, with the aim of both improving scientific enquiry and developing citizenship competences to actively contribute to building a climate-neutral society.


Introduction
Engaging young people to become change-makers [1] in the large challenges of the climate and sustainability crisis requires new educational approaches to empower students to make decisions and move towards social change, going beyond fostering students' environmental awareness. Education has been recognised as a critical element to deliver sustainable development [2,3] (UNESCO, 2012; UNESCO, 2014) and educative institutions need to delineate pedagogies to promote the potentialities embraced by sustainability challenges to effectively work on students' action and citizenship competences [4] allowing them to be ready to build a better world for all.
In this context, a group of six European education organizations have explored this issue within the project named Change the Story, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union [5], which has focused on digital storytelling as a coherent frame for students' research into and exploration of climate change to empower them to become agents of change with their friends and community.

Research Design and Methodology
We worked together with 10 teachers and 60 students during the 2020-2021 school year. Action research [6] was set up to outline the educational foundation for intentional environmental and civic climate action within primary education settings.
Firstly, a flow of learning grounded in the inquiry-based approach [7,8], which also includes the local community as an educational resource [9] and a creative approach of digital storytelling [10], was established to guide the co-design and the evaluation of curriculum units, together with the assessment tools used to chart the competence development progress made by students, as described in Table 1.
A framework document, gathered from the widely used framework TPACK [11], has been outlined, which lays out the principles and thinking behind the design of the Change the Story learning units.

Findings
Pupils showed progression in climate literacy and the development of both sustainability and digital competencies, as shown in Figure 1. Students built an interdisciplinary approach to climate crisis and were able to make connections and interrelations between facts, data and climate data visualization. The communication phase, carried out through digital storytelling, triggered the motivation to re-elaborate findings and to create an effective call to action for schoolmates and friends. In particular, the process of creating digital stories (for some examples, see Figure 2) was found to actively enable and engage pupils in:

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Researching and understanding the basic physical science basis behind climate change; • Searching for causes, effects and solutions; • Having real-world experiences and observing their environment and society regarding climate change; • Reflecting and making connections within the frames of time (past, present, future) and dimension (the self, the community, the global society).

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Expressing their ideas on climate crisis and on what they want to change in order to build a climate-neutral society.

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Competences development data were collected with self-reflection tools such as the one described in Table 2. The results are summarized in Figure 3.

Conclusions
The inquiry approach, revised to include an imaginative, creative phase for digital storytelling, was shown to be an access point for engaging in learning, enhancing scientific, digital and climate literacy, persisting in problem-solving and civic action, promoting collaboration and cooperative work between students, teachers and the community. Work on a real-world content, the climate crisis, has also received positive feedback when developed in the curricular disciplines, as it made learning more meaningful and applicable for students, thus influencing their motivation and the possibilities to learn to act for sustainability [12,13].

Conclusions
The inquiry approach, revised to include an imaginative, creative phase for digital storytelling, was shown to be an access point for engaging in learning, enhancing scientific, digital and climate literacy, persisting in problem-solving and civic action, promoting collaboration and cooperative work between students, teachers and the community. Work on a real-world content, the climate crisis, has also received positive feedback when developed in the curricular disciplines, as it made learning more meaningful and applicable for students, thus influencing their motivation and the possibilities to learn to act for sustainability [12,13].
Author Contributions: L.B. and D.C. both contributed equally to all aspects of the paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: This research was developed within the project Change the Story funded by the Erasmus + programme of the EC, grant number 2019-1-UK01-KA201-061432.
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. No personal data was collected and all the data was anonymised.
Data Availability Statement: Data are available on request to the corresponding author.