Green Education & Climate Literacy: Sustainability Competencies for Teachers

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Knowledge

• Explain the science of the greenhouse effect, the difference between weather and climate, and the leading global sources of human-made greenhouse gas emissions.

• Identify the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability and the GreenComp framework's four competence areas.

• Locate climate change within the European Green Deal, the EU ESD Framework, UNESCO ESD Guidelines, and SDGs 4, 12, 13, 14, 15.

• Recognise the structural drivers of unequal contribution to and unequal impact of climate change, including across the Global North and South and within communities.

Skills

• Run the four signature embodied exercises (greenhouse effect, country clouds, food cubes, mobility tape-measure) with their own classes.

• Design project-based learning (PBL) and inquiry units that integrate climate, sustainability, and global citizenship education across subjects.

• Facilitate respectful, age-appropriate classroom discussions on contested or anxiety-provoking aspects of climate change.

• Integrate citizen science, local data, and outdoor learning into lessons.

• Use simple digital tools to support environmental data collection, visualisation, and student-led storytelling.

Attitudes

• Foster environmental stewardship, critical thinking, and a sense of collective agency in students.

• Adopt a justice-oriented, systems-thinking lens in their own teaching practice.

• Develop teacher resilience and reflective practice for sustaining sustainability education work over time.

The course is structured around four embodied, classroom-ready signature methodologies that are introduced, practised, and adapted with participants during the week:

• The Greenhouse-Blanket Demonstration — using a simple photo sequence and the blanket-on-bed metaphor to make the greenhouse effect, the 1.1°C of warming since 1880, and the 2°C threshold concrete and intuitive for any age group from upper primary onwards.

• The Country Clouds Exercise — a participatory simulation in which students physically arrange themselves to represent the populations of six contrasting countries (e.g. Brazil, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Germany, Canada, UAE) and then receive scaled cardboard 'clouds' representing their per-capita CO₂ emissions, followed by structured role-play discussion on global climate justice.

• The Food Cube Game — using six scaled foam cubes representing the CO₂ equivalent emissions per kilo of common foods (vegetables, fruit, bread, milk, eggs, beef), participants and students physically match food replicas to cubes and uncover why animal products, transport, seasonality and processing matter so much in our diets.

• The Mobility Tape-Measure — using four measuring tapes of different lengths (2.60 m for car, 2.83 m for plane, 16.22 m for train, 17.17 m for bus) to physically demonstrate how far one person can travel per half-gram of CO₂ by each mode of transport, including a discussion of why air travel is more damaging than the tape alone suggests.

  
  

Alongside these signature methods, participants work with:

• Place-based learning and local ecosystem investigations

• Citizen science tools (biodiversity, water quality, air quality monitoring)

• Eco-storytelling and creative narrative methods for climate emotion regulation

• Circular economy and creative reuse activities

• Systems-thinking mapping for cross-curricular planning

• Digital tools for student-led data collection and visualisation

Each participant leaves the course with:

• A full toolkit containing the four signature exercises with all templates (country outlines, cloud templates, food cube measurements, transport tape lengths, percentage cards) ready to print and use

• One fully designed climate-literacy or sustainability PBL unit tailored to their own subject, year group, and school context

• A school sustainability action plan with concrete first steps

• A citizen science activity plan adapted to their local environment

• An eco-storytelling or creative narrative activity for use with their students

• A personal reflective journal and continued-implementation plan

• A Europass Mobility certificate of attendance and a WAVES Certificate, both indicating learning outcomes and contact hours

Cyprus is not a backdrop for this training. It is the classroom.

Cyprus climate has become noticably vulnerable, but besides that, it offers a set of teaching contexts that you cannot find together anywhere else in Europe:

• A frontline Mediterranean climate, with visible impacts on water, agriculture, biodiversity, and coastal life within an hour's drive of Nicosia.

• A traditional Mediterranean food culture (halloumi, olives, citrus, wild greens) that makes the food-and-climate session immediate, sensory, and locally rooted, while also being under direct pressure from climate change.

• The last divided capital in Europe, where climate cooperation is one of the few areas of genuine bi-communal collaboration between Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot civil society, giving teachers a vivid case study of climate as a bridge across political divides.

• A small, accessible country in which an environmental NGO, a school garden, a research institute, and a national forest park can all be visited in five days.

• A receiving society for migrants and refugees, which makes the global-justice dimension of climate change locally tangible.

• WAVES' grassroots networks with schools, educators, environmental NGOs, and community groups in Cyprus, built through our work on global education, peace education, and sustainability.

  
  

Add to this a Mediterranean climate with mild, sunny conditions for most of the academic year, easy direct flights from across Europe to Larnaca, English widely spoken, the euro, and an active cultural and culinary life in Nicosia — and Cyprus becomes one of the most teaching-rich and practically convenient destinations in Europe for a course on climate education.