The project held its kick-off meeting on April 12 at Can Jaumeandreu in Barcelona. This first meeting served to introduce EduFire’s partners, overview the project calendar and organisation, look at the different tasks, and plan the main actions to be carried out during the next months.
EduFire Toolkit is an educational project coordinated by the Pau Costa Foundation, within the frame of the EU’s Erasmus+ programme. The project aims at raising awareness of the challenges regarding climate change and wildfire risk reduction among secondary school teachers and students. To this end, EduFire will develop a set of multidisciplinary teaching resources following a project-based learning methodology, together with activities designed to encourage community participation. The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), the Leitrim County Council (Ireland) and the Instituto Superior de Agronomia (Portugal) are also partners of EduFire.
“In a few decades the youth of today will have to manage landscapes and wildfires. We urgently need to inspire and prepare them today, to better face an uncertain future in wildland fire,” says Celia Conde, EduFire’s project coordinator.
EduFire proposes a transversal approach to fire, wildfires and climate change aligned with the curricula of the different STEAM disciplines. It involves working shoulder to shoulder with different schools to create educational materials which will be later tested in a pilot secondary school in Ireland. The idea is to evaluate and learn from the recommendations and insights of the different actors involved and see the local specificities to adapt the project to different cultural environments. At the end, all the educational materials and outcomes of EduFire will be open access in order to support the educational community to address the problem of climate change, and particularly, its impact on highly relevant wildfires.
“We are optimistic that within a 32-month timeframe we will be able to achieve EduFire’s ambitious yet feasible goals. We want to put the need of wildfire risk reduction on the table and at the same time, get the educational community involved and prepared to incorporate this issue in their curricula,” concludes Conde.
About Erasmus+
Erasmus+ is the EU’s programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe. The 2021-2027 programme places a strong focus on social inclusion, the green and digital transitions, and promoting young people’s participation in democratic life.
