Our motivation
The climate crisis is one of the most significant challenges of the 21st century. It requires holistic climate actions on individual and collective, as well as everyday and strategic levels. However, many current approaches to climate education emphasize scientific facts and personal behaviour, often overlooking the importance of combining them with possibilities of public sphere actions and civic engagement.
With TRACE, we address this gap so that students develop the capacity to meaningfully reflect, learn and act in context of the climate crisis. This includes understanding the science, being motivated to act, and having the skills to deal with common constraints and barriers to contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation.
We build TRACE around five core components: (1) Understanding climate agency, (2) designing a self-reflection tool, (3) working and networking with teachers, (4) implementing and evaluating a student lab, and (5) creating Open Educational Resources.
Five steps of TRACE
Understanding climate agency: building the conceptual foundations
TRACE begins by developing a shared conceptual understanding of climate agency, grounded in interdisciplinary research from science education, psychology, and sociology. This phase provides the theoretical and methodological basis for the development of the TRACE self-reflection tool.
Designing the TRACE self-reflection tool
Based on the conceptual foundations, the project designs an innovative self-reflection tool that helps students make sense of their own climate agency: How do they think and feel about actions, barriers and motivators in the present? How do they imagine futures and possible pathways in relation to climate challenges? The tool will be iteratively refined throughout the project and published in its final version on this website.
Working and networking with teachers
Teachers play a central role in TRACE. This step involves collaborative workshops, professional development sessions, and co-designing activities with pre-service and in-service teachers. The project builds a European community of educators committed to strengthening students’ climate agency and integrating the TRACE approach into science and citizenship education.
Implementing and evaluating a student lab for science and citizenship education
TRACE develops a student lab focused on science and citizenship education, deliberation, and participatory engagement with climate issues. The lab is implemented with secondary school students in partner countries and evaluated to understand its impact on students’ climate agency and learning processes.
Creating Open Educational Resources and Policy briefs
The final step focuses on communicating and disseminating the project outcomes, like tools, guidelines, research insights, and recommendations. Our target audience are schools, educators, policymakers, and researchers. The goal is to support long-term adoption of the TRACE approach and contribute to meaningful climate education across Europe.
