Ilmari climate education project for schools
Ilmari aims to increase young people’s understanding about carbon neutral future. We bring young enthusiastic people to classrooms and raise up the issue about "why should anything be worth anything".
Ilmari is carried out by three environmental NGOs and one youth NGO. The four NGOs, Friends of the Earth Finland, Dodo and Finnish Nature Conservation Association for Youth and Youth Academy, have worked on a shared view on sustainable future.
We choose young people of about 24-30 years of age, typically university undergraduates, to be educated for Ilmari school visitors. We train them to talk with pupils of ages 12-16 who often feel that there is nothing to do and the planet is going to be destroyed.
Under the years we have also held different kinds of workshops and longer series of events for the youth. The best concept seems still to be school visits, that are scheduled to fit into a regular school day so that amount of extra work from the teachers' side is minimized. We believe that easiness stimulates even the less environmentally aware teachers to take advantage of this opportunity.
The focus of our work has changed a lot during the past nine years. The future oriented and dialogue-based approach of today is totally different from that of 2002, when the focus was in informing young people about the enormous global risks.
Goals
- To inform middle school, secondary school and high school students and teachers about climate chance and it’s consequences
- To create situations where young people can think and discuss their own role in fighting and causing climate change
- To give ideas for decreasing individual climate emissions
- To support projects in which young people on their own search information, act and draw conclusions about climate.
Materials
The Ilmari lection is a very visual experience with lots of photos. The transparencies can be seen at Slideshare and the videos at youtube.
School visits
Since the first school visit in 2003, more than 50 000 young people have attended Ilmari lections.
School visitors
We have trained more than 350 school visitors who frequently report having benefited a lot from not only the opportunity to discuss the climate change in the schools but also from the education given by the project and the valuable contacts to other school visitors.