Sustainability Action Plan for School and for the Community

About:

Overall, the Alcanena Schools Cluster recognised that many of its learners:

• come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds;
• have learning disabilities, physical challenges or mental health difficulties;
• have migrant and refugee backgrounds;
• do not have a satisfactory command of Portuguese;
• have care responsibilities at home.

Therefore, the Schools Cluster had previously adopted a flexible and individualised educational response based on pedagogical differentiation and flexible curricula.

Building on this, the Schools Cluster designed and implemented a Sustainability Action Plan for the School and for the Community. This effort enabled learners to influence an action plan to improve their environment. It also aimed to provide learners with the experience of sharing agency with other stakeholders and actively participating in school life and the broader community.

To implement the Sustainability Action Plan, a co-ordinator council was created involving 20 volunteer learners and a head teacher. The Action Plan overall involved 1,100 learners in addition to teachers, professionals, families, school leaders, and stakeholders from the municipality, local universities and other institutions.

The initiative involved several steps, including:

• Class assemblies and councils, which enabled learners to share how they feel about their school and local environment, generate and debate proposals for improvements and validate those proposals
• Voting days, which gave learners the opportunity to vote on proposals to be included in the school and community Sustainability Action Plan
• Strategic partnerships, which enabled learners to work with universities, science and technology centres and certified labs to validate their ideas
• A local festival, where learners had the chance to present their Sustainability Action Plan to the municipality, families, community entrepreneurial sector and other stakeholders
• Dissemination efforts, including publication of the learners’ action plan in the Alcanena Schools Cluster magazine which was offered to all the families and posted online.

Outcomes:

The Sustainability Action Plan was accepted by the community and is being implemented.

One STEM teacher co-ordinator reflected:

This initiative led us to regard our role as teachers more as coaches, as students were the ones to propose the measures to community environmental problems and to improve school facilities, making use of the contents they are learning. It is also up to the students to broaden the set of contexts, such as contacting community members, namely, to ask for support in designing, validating and implementing each project/measure.

Ana Cláudia Cohen, the Head of the Alcanena Schools Cluster, stated:

The Alcanena Schools Cluster considers the student’s well-being in a way that allows the timely reorientation of the individual, taking the first steps in building a personalised, individualised, differentiated or tailored curriculum, enabling each student to be a potential changemaker for his/her school, community, country, continent and planet.

Finally, a learner shared their perspective about the experience:

It has been a great opportunity to make choices and pursue topics that interest us the most. It has been great to work together with our peers from different grades and with different talents and to listen to their perspectives or suggestions.

Key element(s) of the VIA Framework:

This project is a remarkable example of creating SPACE, establishing VOICE and ensuring relevant AUDIENCE for learner and family participation. Learners were given concrete opportunities and processes for how to not only come up with ideas, but to take them to fruition and see them play out both in the school environment and the larger community.

Learn more:

Ashoka Portugal website and film about the Alcanena Schools Cluster (in Portuguese)

National newspaper article about the Alcanena Schools Cluster (in Portuguese)