Participation and impact - target group-oriented methodology and impact measurement in environmental education

Children and young people have a right to participate and help shape the future. Participation opportunities should make it clear to future generations that active participation is a central component of a democratic system. Young people need to experience that participation can be successful and does not remain without consequences. This approach is taken up by the “Participation and Impact” project. The project is divided into two main areas: The first involves investigating which topics and methods young people would like to see in environmental education. To this end, all-day participation workshops will be held with different age groups throughout Germany. A balanced regional distribution (east/west and north/south as well as urban and rural regions) and the inclusion of different types of schools and different socio-cultural backgrounds provide a broad basis of knowledge. These findings are compared with trends in existing environmental education programs. The second step of the study relates to the target group-oriented impact measurement of various environmental education programs. Here, an inventory of scientific findings on impact measurement in the field of environmental education is first carried out and discussed with representatives from science and practice. In addition, the perspective of practitioners, who are constantly confronted with the challenges of impact measurement in the implementation of environmental education programs, will be considered separately. To this end, workshops will be held in several regions of Germany and the experiences and views of the stakeholders with regard to measuring impact using various methods will be compiled. These findings will then be processed and summarized. In a third overarching and discursive step, the two sets of topics will be related to each other and initial findings will be compared and discussed in workshops with the experiences of practitioners from school and non-school environmental education institutions. In the course of the research project, the findings will also be presented in five action papers and five policy papers with recommendations for action for various target groups. The results may be of great interest to institutions that conceptualize and promote environmental education. The project is supported by two subcontracted partners. Heide Kolling is the graphic designer responsible for the graphic presentation of the individual project results and Friederike Korte from the IZT (Institute for Futures Studies and Technology Assessment) is responsible for the in-depth study of methodological issues in the field of design thinking. Both are from Berlin. You can find the final report here (German only). The final conference took place on January 23, 2019. Below you will find the presentations:

The presentations are in German.

Presentation of the project results WP 1

Presentation of the project results WP 2

Presentation of the project results WP 3

Presentation Challenges and outlook