Joint Seminar on Climate Change Education Held by SMILE and Save the Children International

On the afternoon of August 7, the Shanghai Municipal Institute for Lifelong Learning (SMILE) and Save the Children International held a joint seminar on climate change education. Save the ChildrenInternational’s program officers Du Dancheng and Xu Xin’er had an in-depth discussion and exchange with Prof. Li Jiacheng, Executive Vice President of SMILE, Zou Wen, Director of the Administration Department, Associate Prof. Zhu Min, Chief Researcher of the ESD Program, Gu Huifen, Principal of Longhutang Experimental Primary School of Changzhou City, Xinbei District of Jiangsu Province, Gu Peipei, a teacher from Shanghai No. 1 High School, PhD student Li Shuhan, graduate student Yang Ziyi, and so on.

Strengthening “home-school-community-enterprise”multi-dimensional cooperation and participation is a key initiative to promote climate change education. This seminar focused on Climate Change Education through the Home-School-Community-Enterprise Collaboration project.

Participants engaged in in-depthdiscussion about the overall design, orientation, implementation methods, promotion of results, and other difficult issuesof the project, which played a positive role in further improving and implementing the project.

During the seminar, Prof. Li Jiacheng, Executive Vice President of SMILE, said that the project “Climate Change Education through Home-School-Community-EnterpriseCollaboration” which was in the stage of careful planning and upcoming cooperation, could be implemented with three focuses: “Characteristic”, “Influential” and ‘Exemplary’. To be specific, first, the project should highlight the characteristics of climate change education and encourage the role and performance of children’s leadership. Second, the project should make full use of the international background and resource network of Save the Children International to expand its international impact. Third, the project should attach significance tothe promotion and display of the guidelines, models, relevant standards, typical cases, conferences and forums, and the cultivation of cooperative targets (schools)in a diversified and effective way.

Education plays a crucial role in global action against climate change, which is a major challenge the world is facing today. Meanwhile, climate change education is a global systemic project that requires the collaborative efforts of governments, schools, social organizations, enterprises, and other stakeholders. It is reported that SMILE is actively promoting the progress of the “Climate Change Education Program”, taking the construction of the “Climate Change Education Laboratory of East China Normal University” as an opportunity to fully integrate the resources of relevant disciplines, and aims to unite the forces of lifelong education and the construction of a learning society, such as Shanghai Climate Week, Save the Children International, community colleges and universities for the aged in various districts, and primary and secondary schools across the country, in the context of climate change as a comprehensive issue, in order to continuously promote the practical and theoretical development of climate change education, and to make contributions to to building a society characterized by harmonious coexistence between humanand nature. As the second official meeting in the past six months, this seminar has witnessed the full exchangeof views between the two sides on the cooperation of the climate change education program, which further clarified the consensus and direction of the follow-up cooperation in the field of climate change education and other areas.

Contributed By: Li Shuhan

Reviewed By: Zou Wen, Li Jiacheng