The UN and UNESCO define education as a vital tool in developing ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) to a global phenomenon. In Europe this has been taken into account in curriculums widely but too often ESD is considered as an ‘add on’. Instead it should be a natural and essential part of school culture in order to educate students towards a sustainable way of life. There were four schools taking part in the ECORoad project, from Finland, Great Britain, Iceland and Belgium. Each of the selected partner schools have been committed to ESD for many years and they were well known for this work within their local communities. Each school also had a local specialist partner for supporting the schools' work to implement ESD. The ultimate target for ECORoad was to change pupils’, families’ and the whole community’s way of life to a more sustainable one. During the project we focused to improve each participating school’s culture to enable and support teachers work and school’s daily life within ESD. Through local and international trainings teachers learned new skills and developed their practices in designing and delivering ESD for their pupils. In addition to the local goals, the project wanted to influence the wider audience by producing a booklet, “Roadmap to an ESD school”. There were five project meetings, four of which focused on a specific area of school culture. Based on theories we divided school culture into four parts 1) Professional orientation, 2) Organizational structure (leadership and management), 3) Teaching and learning and 4) Student-centered focus. Before each project meeting there was self evaluation for the staff about the current practice in the specific area of school culture. During the meetings schools shared the results of their self-evaluations- their strengths and areas for development- and, in consultation with their partner schools and specialist partners, drew up an action plan with three targets for development. These targets were then implemented at school and the outcomes shared at the following project meeting. This kind of working methodology was good and it structured the development tasks into smaller parts. Between project meetings ECORoad also organized four teachers’ trainings into different aspects of ESD. Those themes were 1) Health and wellbeing of our establishment, 2) Outdoor education, 3) Living to learn or learning to live and 4) School's ecological daily life. Each participating school organized one training together with their specialist organization. Training programs included workshops of different methodology of ESD, job shadowing, visiting different schools and nature activities. After each teachers' training week there was an organized survey for participants and the feedback was very positive. Teacher trainings were useful for the whole project, because after the training sessions more participants felt ownership for the ECORoad project. We produced and published a booklet, ‘A Roadmap to an ESD School’ to encourage and support other schools to embrace ESD. The booklet is a comprehensive guide on how to develop a school culture which supports ESD based on our own journey. The booklet is universal and contains practical instructions and questionnaires. It was printed for the dissemination events, but it is freely downloadable from the ECORoad project’s homepage at https://ecoroad.weebly.com/. The ECORoad project had objectives for four different target groups: pupils, teachers, project schools and other schools nearby and far. Based on surveys and self-evaluations implemented in the project, it can be seen that ECORoad has influenced the school culture for implementing sustainable development. The surveys made at the beginning and at the end of the project showed that the awareness of sustainable development among staff in project schools had increased and that pupils got more school experiences related to the theme of sustainable development. Examples how we improved our school culture and practical examples of activities made by pupils can be seen in the booklet “Roadmap to an ESD School”. During and now at the end of project each participant has developed their own dissemination plan e.g. consultations, presentations, articles. The main message in dissemination events has been 1) education has important role for promoting sustainable development, 2) the school culture affects how sustainable development is implemented in teaching and school’s daily life and 3) “Roadmap to an ESD school” shows some of our steps to be taken toward ESD school. There are still many possibilities to improve ESD in project schools, but it can be said that these schools are now ESD centres of excellence in their own area. ESD is now more integrated into the school culture and the project has ensured that ESD is not a passing project in these participating schools but now embedded in their core values.

The effects of environmental issues constitute a global legacy that future generations must contend with regardless of where they live. International community governments have committed to increasing awareness about environmental issues largely through their national educational systems, focusing on sustainability. Such education, however, tends to be limited to the classroom. Only by involving pupils as valid stakeholders in shared environmental issues, through activities that extend beyond classrooms, can we truly lay the foundations for a sustainable future. Developing partnerships between schools across Europe widens the scope of global awareness and responsibility. Transnational exchange of experiences is essential to develop pupils’ experience beyond their local environment, leading to a broader worldview and increased tolerance of the situation of others. To cultivate a sense of empathy and social justice, pupils need to be aware of the situation of peers elsewhere.The 2-year GEAR project seeks ways to increase the voice and agency of pupils in environmental matters by developing methodologies that, using existing environmental education as a point of departure, involve pupils more actively in their local environment. The purpose is to bring schools together, under the umbrella of environmental responsibility, to devise collective tools to break out of the classroom. (1)Bottom-up Pedagogical Approaches to actively engage pupils(2)Basic Skills and Competences are a means to an end rather than the end itself(3)ICT skills central to activities and dissemination(4)Local Communities of Practice to connect pupils with their environments(5)Nature Discourses: vocabulary and concepts to understand the environment(6)A Transnational Community of Practice: shared experiences and values internationallyThe project unfolds around a 4-element framework (Wind, Water, Earth, Sun). Activities will be geared for pupils at each school, covering a collective age range of 2 - 15 years (pre-primary to secondary). They are designed to promote interdisciplinary co-operation diversely in science, ICT, technology, arts and maths (STEAM) fields, and are approached in different ways by each partner, based on their pedagogical strengths. Pupils should develop a personal connection with the environment, increase their nature discourses, and feel more empowered in environmental matters. Each school will develop a community of practice; a social system concerned with the social nature of learning and involving our common undertaking, leading to identification with the community. The transnational aspect extends this, whereby, pupils and teachers create and become part of a transnational community of practice that shares responsible environmental awareness and values that cross borders.The countries of the 6 project partner schools extend from the north of Europe to the south, representing a range of different climates and contexts (urban/rural):(1)Rajala School, public primary, Finland (Co-ordinating Partner)(2)GBS De Kreke, primary, Belgium(3)Private School Themistoklis, S.A., primary and secondary, Greece(4)Dumlupinar Ortaokulu, public secondary, Turkey(5)Istituto Comprensivo Pablo Neruda, public nursery, primary, and secondary, Italy(6)Goizeko Izarra Ikastola, primary, Basque Country, SpainThe project also has connections with universities (University of Eastern Finland and PANTEION University), thus novel partnerships between schools and scientists can be explored. The 8 joint staff training events are for teacher training and developing collective tools. Teachers can share their experiences and good practice with partners. Participant teachers must disseminate material upon return. The International Classroom pupil mobility allows some pupils from all partner countries to come together in real time, and work together under the project for a week.The GEAR Toolkit will comprise tools in the form of didactical rationales, methods and methodologies from the project activities and qualitative measurement tools to be disseminated electronically. In addition, the results and impact of this project are closely linked to the enrichment of the pupils, teachers, and other adults involved. The greatest expected impact will be on the pupils in terms of enhanced environmental awareness and responsibility, better working skills to tackle activities, closer connection to their local environment, and inclusion in a broader transnational community of practice. These impacts will be measured qualitatively by developing project-specific tools.Climate change is the most serious problem faced by the world today, so the project covers a current topic and an area of education that will only increase in importance and significance. Environmental awareness and responsibility can only develop through active participation and inclusion, so GEAR is only a beginning towards developing environmental education pedagogy.

context / background / objectives of the project Due to the hectic and very rapidly changing society in the EU, we want to give the pupils and the teachers of the partner schools a unique learning opportunity to work better together, to experiment with the many facets of technology, to discover their talents. We develop as many talents as possible from everyone. All children, underprivileged, non-native speakers, migrant population and also the inclusion pupils are fully covered. We start at a very young age. Preschoolers work together with primary school students. In Belgium a lot of experience exists on teaching to above mentioned audiences and we would like to share this with other countries .We give students a broader view of European society. The pupils and teachers learn a lot from each other. We improve the quality of education by learning from and with each other. The education system needs to adapt its objectives and methodology towards promoting and encouraging skills needed to guide the pupils in in a more productive, effective and happy way towards the society. Educational institutions and families are the key factors in achieving well-balanced people who may have success in their vital objectives, learning how to solve conflicts in an effective way and definitely that they are happier and more optimistic people. This project includes a high innovation experience by creating a virtual learning environment where all participants in the project will share resources and activities. The project is composed out of two tracks: 1) The first track concerns concrete activities for the pupils of pre-primary education (assisted by pupils of the primary school) that are realized by all partner schools and that materialize in step-by-step guides and explanatory guides. 2) The second track concerns experience sharing of teachers: pre-school education teachers will share good practices during 5 joint-staff events (3 joint-staff events on 'personal and social competences' and 2 joint-staff training events on' engineering competences '). We start from the strengths of every school / country. After each training activity each school chooses at least one good practice that the teachers test in practice and provide feedback on. All acquired methods will be bundled (on the website and on ETwinning) for future re-use. An important aspect of our project is the dissemination of achieved results. The provided IT tools will allow us to network with teachers from all over Europe and interactively exchange experiences. The final aim being learning through each other, and ensure that we as a school team are better skilled to do our job and provide the best education possible for the next generations. participants: (schools from Italy, Spain, France, Iceland, Belgium) (900 pupils and 150 teachers are reached) All partners have been chosen on following topics: * a strong focus on the development of the personality of children * existing expertise on the project's themes The partnership has been established through different contacts: partners were identified on the e -Twinning website, by filtering on topic. Contacts were established with the ones who showed enthusiasm, reactivity and collaborated with innovative ideas. Three partners are new to European projects (Spain, Iceland and Italy). The coordinator (that has acquired already experience in projects at European level) will provide those with the necessary support in the organization of the project. Objectives, long term benefits and results: objectives for the teachers *teachers want to strengthen their didactic skills to help the children develop their personal and social competence and the engineering competence. *teachers learn from each other methods around the project theme that guarantee the social inclusion of all pupils in the classroom. *strengthen the quality of education to develop insight into new ways of working and tendencies etc. objectives for the pupils (3-12 years): *the children develop a strong personal competence: they discover what their talents are, confidence in their own abilities, great well-being, self-esteem, etc. *the children develop a strong social competence: they can work together within a diverse class group, they learn that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, *the children develop a strong engineering competence: they are motivated for learning about engineering / technology, they learn problem-solving thinking, etc. Results: 1) we make a bundle of the good practices that we got to know during the joint-staff training, published on e-twinning 2) the step-by-step guides: a handbook with assignments to reinforce pupils' personal, social and engineering competence through language-poor assignments that guarantee the inclusion of all pupils. 3)the website, with pictures, plans, movies of the activities, the lipdub, ... 4)games, tests that we can use every year.