For schools

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Environmental education

#sosteniamoci! is a structured didactic program for all secondary schools.

Following the positive experiences held during spring 2014 at the scientific high schools Volta-Fellini of Riccione and E. Vendramini of Pordenone (Italy), from the academic year 2014/15 #sosteniamoci! is proposed as a structured environmental education activity to all secondary schools of the Rimini province, thanks to the support of coop. Il Millepiedi.

Thanks to the enthusiasm with which it has been received by the Cesare-Valgimigli high school in Rimini, the project has been able to get 832 kids involved, coming from 35 different classes with classic, linguistic, economical-social and social sciences curricula.

Furthermore, aiming at constantly improving and adjusting the proposal to kids needs, in April 2015 a new expositive modality has been tested with great success at the Volta-Fellini high school: the visual conference.

The standard proposal is a one-day event, lasting 2 hours, where to accompany kids in a journey of analisis and discovery of the world laying in front of them… to understand how to shape the one they would like to live tomorrow.

Download the 2014/15 flyer (in italian) 

#sosteniamoci per le scuole secondarie 706.96 KB

Following an introduction on what is sustainability and why should it matter to talk about it, 3 themes selected among the following ones are deepened:

  • ENERGY – An overview on the energy consumption required by modern society is first given, before analysing pros and cons of fossil fuels, introducing the concepts of peak oil and climate change. Renewable energies are then dealt with, not as a panacea but rather as a poweful potential solution requiring a profound change in everyone’s mentality. What can we do to ease this process?
  • FOOD – Too often we do not recognize that what we put in our dish matters, and it matters a lot! The agro-food system is in absolute among the most devastating sectors environmentally, from the global to the local, from resource consumption to pollutant production, up to climate change and social justice. And yet the solution is at our very hand: just mind what you put in your dish.
  • WASTES – We constantly throw stuff away, but where does it end? Nowhere, as in one way or another everything is kept in circle within the planet and, sooner or later, will come back to us asking for the bill. And yet wastes could really beacome a precious resource, just by using the 3R: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Once again everything depends on our informed choices: we could do a lot.
  • CONSUMPTION – The economic model on which our society relies on imposes a high-consumption lifestyle to all of us, but what is true cost of this? Are we really paying it only through money? Some essential concepts are introduced (globalization, consumerism, externalities, human rights, the role of media) to discuss potentialities and risks of the modern world where we live.
  • MOBILITY – During the last century the automobile has literally shaped our cities, often making them stressful, highly contaminated and rather unsafe places to live in. How did we get there? Aside from infrastructure policies, which do not depend on us, it is important to know that today we have a good handful of alternatives to make our territory better liveable. It would be enought to know it… and to want to do it!

The event takes place as a presentation of 1h30′, with audio-veido support and using the effective tool of storytelling. At the ed of it, 30′ are dedicated to a debate in which kids can make questions and share their thoughts.

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The peculiarity of the program is to adopt a dual perspective: first we need to look at the problems from above, in all their complexity and global relevance; but right after that, it is essential to get back with our feet on the ground we walk everyday, proposing – based on what we just saw from above – tangible actions that anyone may out into practice to solve those problems. In doing so, we answer two fundamental questions that anyone of us knows very well:

Are you a professor and wnat to know how to propose this project in your school? Contact me, we could bring it forward together!

Are you a student and want to know more about these topics? Let me know about it, together we could propose this project to your professors!