Sustainable lifestyles, adapting to climate change, caring for the environment, means that citizens need to have the right skills and need to apply them in everyday life. The project addresses these needs – creates learning opportunities that develop these(green) skills, hence the people are better equipped to fight the climate change.
The case studies will be mainly addressing the local authorities, providing concrete examples on how to approach the topic of a Learning City with the focus on Sustainability.
Attractive, easy to study learning materials in form of micro-learning units to make it easy for citizens to
study.
It provides concrete, experience-based good practices for the replicability of project actions and results, community-based development & education and training initiatives
This project addresses several of the needs set in the new European Agenda for Adult learning:
• governance of adult learning – with a strong focus on whole-of-government national strategies and stakeholder
partnerships
• supply and take-up of lifelong learning opportunities with sustainable funding
• accessibility and flexibility – to adapt to the needs of adult
• quality, equity, inclusion and success in adult learning – emphasising the professional development of adult learning staff,
the mobility of both learners and staff, quality assurance and active support to disadvantaged groups
• the green and digital transitions and related skill needs
Further there are more specific needs that we established in the course of implementing the project LEAP I, namely:
1. Insufficient capacities of (smaller) cities to deal with adult education and learning policies
2. Low awareness of local authorities of the lifelong learning benefits for the individuals and communities
3. Low awareness of the concept of Learning Cities among local authorities and the facts that it may not require huge
investments of money, time, or capacities to prepare some learning initiatives
4. Low awareness of the concept of Learning Cities among other actors of the educational ecosystem
5. Insufficient learning opportunities in the area of green skills or skills for sustainability
6. Insufficient capacities of local authorities to tackle the climate change and sustainability issues
7. Low interest of citizens to learn
And there is the general need to significantly increase adult participation in formal, non-formal and informal learning
The specific objectives of the project are:
• to empower the local level of governance, to tackle the sustainability issues through increasing their “green/sustainability skills”
• to empower the educational ecosystem to work towards sustainability issues by increasing their “green/sustainability skills” and providing tools for developing “green / sustainability skills”
• to facilitate the adoption of Learning Cities concepts in smaller scale through concrete examples and recommendations.
The primary target group of the project are local authorities (of smaller cities). If they are to apply the concept of Learning
Cities in practice, they need to get user-friendly tools that are adapted also to the scale of small towns or municipalities.
These tools will be content-specific as they will all be related to the sustainability issues, more specifically, green issues.
When the local authorities better grasp what green skills are, what is the education for sustainability, sustainable lifestyle,
they will be better equipped to facilitate these for the citizens.
The secondary target group is the citizens - the addresses of the efforts to raise the green skills. As it is clearly difficult to
tackle the citizens at large, we will do so via the members of the local education ecosystem such as libraries, NGOs,
schools, eco-centres, chambers of commerce, etc. Each of these organisations has their users, visitors or clients - citizens
who are targeted by the project.
The project activities include the examination of Learning Cities grouped in the cluster of Education for Sustainability,
development and testing of learning materials for green skills in the form of micro-learning online units in close cooperation with stakeholders and actors from the education ecosystem, development of a platform for these OER and finally a set of events to engage target groups and stakeholders to share and exploit the results.
The main project results are:
• Case Studies on Education for Sustainability in Learning Cities to provide concrete examples to local authorities on how to build green skills.
• LEAP II Platform with Series of Micro-learning materials on green skills to create learning opportunities for all citizens and generations.
• Manual and recommendations for building of (small scale) Learning Cities to help spread the Learning City concept and contribute to raising awareness of the importance and benefits of LLL
26 October 2023
This week, we have successfully launched the LEAP II project (Local Adult Education Policy II, Erasmus+) project, which is a follow-up of the LEAP I project, completed in the summer of 2023 and positively evaluated by the Erasmus+ National Agency. The partner teams from Italy, Romania, Belgium, Hungary, Slovakia, and Spain, led by AINova (Slovakia) virtually met at the kick-off international project meeting. The project's main goal is to help local governments in their sustainability efforts, by developing so-called "green skills" or "skills for sustainability". As the partners are primarily involved in various forms of education for all ages, especially for adults, the support to local governments and green skills is also designed through education. A helpful framework for our efforts is the concept of Learning Cities, a UNESCO initiative that has been successfully implemented worldwide. The LEAP II consortium will develop a series of case studies focusing on sustainability actions and education in already existing Learning Cities, which will serve as a guide for municipal leaders to develop the "green skills" of their citizens. The project will also produce a series of microlearning materials for local governments and citizens and a manual with recommendations on how to build a Learning City in the context of smaller cities.
Marta Jendeková, AINova
Co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union
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