Shape the EU future citizen. Environmental education on the European Green Deal

Abstract

The Green SCENT project aims to educate European citizens to acquire green skills within the eight Focus Areas identified by the EU Green Deal Communication. The funded project involves 15 partners from 10 European countries. The very first outcome of the project is to build a competence framework for shaping the future environmental education of European citizens. The task specifically involved 13 researchers, organised into 8 teams (one for each focus area addressed by the Green Deal communication) who worked on the project for approximately 11 months (January to November 2022). The aim of the project described in this study was to establish competences, and their specificities in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes, creating a competence framework on sustainability issues and incorporating the feedback and insights of stakeholders by placing them as co-creators. From the developed competence framework, an interactive knowledge graph of competences was created as a practical tool to present and exploit the competence framework. This was then used to incorporate the bottom-up perspective and open up a discussion on research that hitherto had a top-down scientific approach only with competence elicited from literature data. In this paper the identified competences for the focus areas of Circular Economy, Clean Energy and Smart Mobility are used as case study. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of innovative stakeholder contributions obtained through the Delphi study, the workshops and the assemblies with citizens of all ages, backgrounds and educational levels. The ultimate knowledge artefact consists of more than 120 competences articulated in over 2500 knowledge, skills and attitude descriptions.