Closing of the “Sustainability and Energy Use Athens-Berlin” project
The school building as a living learning space – a very interesting project is coming to an end and we have a lot to share with you!
What happens when a school building is transformed into a space where students express themselves creatively on important and complex issues such as energy conservation and climate change?
The Community Energy River team, as part of the Erasmus+ 2024-2025 project “Sustainability and Energy Use Athens-Berlin”, held workshops on energy tours and energy saving in schools and also designed experiential environmental education workshops with the aim of addressing environmental issues through the arts!
During the first phase of the program, Community Energy River visited 27 elementary and middle schools with the energy saving suitcase. The students became researchers and observed their school building with a different perspective! They recorded the problems with the building and used instruments to measure the temperature, humidity, brightness, and carbon dioxide concentration in different classrooms. In this way, they were able to create their own eco-code and draw conclusions about what they could change in their behavior in order to save energy in their school.
Through this process, the school community became aware of the important issue of energy conservation and the energy footprint of buildings. A special moment that confirms this was when students from three high schools in the municipality of Chalandri represented their teams and talked with their municipality about their experience from the experiential workshops that Community Energy River did with them. Particularly at the 4th High School of Chalandri, with the opportunity of the parallel integration of its building into an energy upgrade program, a pilot participatory design workshop was held on the energy upgrade of the school building, with the participation of the municipality and experts who worked together with the group of students. You can see more in the videos here and here.
The rest of the project focused more on connecting science with art through the creation of educational material that was initially piloted and then rolled out to 33 schools with 67 workshops in primary and secondary schools.
Through art, theater, and painting, students had the opportunity to express themselves creatively on the theme “School is my second home”. They discussed what they like and dislike about their school and, through role-playing games, imagined the school building as a talking creature and brought it to life by painting it. Among their drawings, we encountered the “colorful school,” the “multicolored school,” the “black school,” the “school-home,” the “human school,” and many other unique characters.
And if the school-creature had a voice, what would it say, what would it ask of us? The time has come to listen to it, to think about how we can take better care of it so that it is in better condition and so that students and teachers can enjoy themselves in it!
In a different approach, an experiential game became the catalyst for engaging students in addressing climate change. School groups familiarized themselves with the concept of the carbon footprint that humans leave on the planet, understanding and connecting climate change to their everyday lives. They set their own goals for changes they can implement in their daily lives, confirming the workshop’s goal of “We are changing climate change!”
“We will walk instead of taking the car”, “we will consume local fruits and vegetables”, “we will reuse and donate toys and clothes we no longer use”… these are some of the ideas that were heard! Envisioning solutions empowers the school community to make a long-term commitment to action, laying the foundations for a society with active citizens for the future.
Both workshops were implemented in primary and secondary schools in Athens during the 2024-2025 school year, and due to their experiential and creative content, they were easily adapted for different groups of adolescents. Specifically, the climate change workshop was implemented in schools and venues for groups of adolescents from different countries and with a refugee background, highlighting how global the phenomenon is and how urgent the need for a holistic and collective response is, regardless of where we live. Similarly, the workshop on school buildings was very successful in raising awareness among students at the Special Vocational Training Workshop in Athens, who expressed themselves very freely and in different ways about the problems of their school building and their ideas for addressing them.
* The Erasmus+ 2024-2025 project “Sustainability and Energy Use Athens -Berlin” was implemented from January 2024 to December 2025 in schools and educational institutions and is aimed at primary and secondary school students and teachers (Smaller Partnerships in School Education program, number 2023-2-DE03-KA210-SCH-000183361). The program was implemented by Community Energy River in Athens and Respekt für Griechenland e.V., BNE-Zentrum, Unabhängiges Institut für Umweltfragen in Berlin.
