GREEEN Kick-off meeting in Göttingen
The GREEEN network partners met for the first time in January 2014. The kick-off meeting aimed at getting to know to each other and at creating a common work basis. The network receives funding for three years. The ultimate aim is to establish a solid basis for a sustainable network that is open for new partners at European level.
For this purpose, GREEEN intends to organise a number of events, among others training days, webinars, the GREEEN award, in order to make GREEEN visible at a European level, and to provide interesting products and services that attract new partners. One of the products will be a collection of good practices and teaching and learning strategies on climate change education.
As a starting point, partners in the kick-off meeting identified challenges they are confronted with in science education as well as possible improvements in order to create a basis, on which to start gathering existing practice and generating new approaches in Climate Change Education.
The results of this discussion are visualised in the tagcloud: 
It was agreed that it is often hard to motivate students in science education. An improvement was seen in making science education more practical and applicable to real life situations. Pratical inputs and real life topics that are of interest for the students seem a solution. Also an exchange with other schools, businesses and other fields was mentioned as a possible improvement. Learning outside the school as well as promoting self-directed learning were two methods that were considered as interesting ways to motivate students. The two-day meeting was far too short to go into depth with the topic. Thus the group split into three work groups that will work on the following topics:
- Integrating climate change contents and examples (internal);
- Integrating external practice and expertise/presenting innovative methods and tools;
- Networking.
The first results are expected in March.