**1. Introduction**

Engaging young people to become change-makers [1] in the large challenges of the climate and sustainability crisis requires new educational approaches to empower students to make decisions and move towards social change, going beyond fostering students' environmental awareness. Education has been recognised as a critical element to deliver sustainable development [2,3] (UNESCO, 2012; UNESCO, 2014) and educative institutions need to delineate pedagogies to promote the potentialities embraced by sustainability challenges to effectively work on students' action and citizenship competences [4] allowing them to be ready to build a better world for all.

In this context, a group of six European education organizations have explored this issue within the project named Change the Story, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union [5], which has focused on digital storytelling as a coherent frame for students' research into and exploration of climate change to empower them to become agents of change with their friends and community.

### **2. Research Design and Methodology**

We worked together with 10 teachers and 60 students during the 2020–2021 school year. Action research [6] was set up to outline the educational foundation for intentional environmental and civic climate action within primary education settings.

Firstly, a flow of learning grounded in the inquiry-based approach [7,8], which also includes the local community as an educational resource [9] and a creative approach of digital storytelling [10], was established to guide the co-design and the evaluation of curriculum units, together with the assessment tools used to chart the competence development progress made by students, as described in Table 1.

A framework document, gathered from the widely used framework TPACK [11], has been outlined, which lays out the principles and thinking behind the design of the Change the Story learning units.

**Citation:** Baglivo, L.; Conti, D. Change the Story, Learning to Make a Difference in Climate Crisis. *Environ. Sci. Proc.* **2022**, *14*, 4. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/environsciproc2022014004

Academic Editors: Andreas Ch. Hadjichambis, Pedro Reis, Marie-Christine Knippels, Audrone˙ Telesiene, Daphne Goldman, Demetra Paraskeva-Hadjichambi, Jan Cincera and Kateˇrina Janˇcaˇríková

Published: 1 March 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.


**Table 1.** Dimension of the competences considered in Change the Story.

#### **3. Findings**

Pupils showed progression in climate literacy and the development of both sustainability and digital competencies, as shown in Figure 1. Students built an interdisciplinary approach to climate crisis and were able to make connections and interrelations between facts, data and climate data visualization. The communication phase, carried out through digital storytelling, triggered the motivation to re-elaborate findings and to create an effective call to action for schoolmates and friends. In particular, the process of creating digital stories (for some examples, see Figure 2) was found to actively enable and engage pupils in:


**Figure 1.** Results of teachers pre- and post-piloting competences assessment.

**Table 2.** Change the Story aimed to support pupils in developing and self-reflecting on their own digital stories about the climate crisis. Since the goal is that pupils prepare and communicate stories that are powerful to them, formative assessment tools supported content knowledge and competences development process. This example of a self-reflection tool was used throughout the process of producing a digital story about the climate crisis.


**Figure 2.** Example of stories created by pupils. The creative components and the communication phase of the learning flow of the project were inspirational and motivating for participating students: (**a**) storyboard for the story *We are ambassadors. [we need urgently to talk to you about climate crisis]*; (**b**) *Stop to unnecessary CO2 emission [Yes, it is still possible!]*. This video, made with Minecraft, emphasizes what adults should do to cut their carbon emissions.

**Figure 3.** Results from pupils' self-assessment of content knowledge and competences development after completing the piloting.

### **4. Conclusions**

The inquiry approach, revised to include an imaginative, creative phase for digital storytelling, was shown to be an access point for engaging in learning, enhancing scientific, digital and climate literacy, persisting in problem-solving and civic action, promoting collaboration and cooperative work between students, teachers and the community. Work on a real-world content, the climate crisis, has also received positive feedback when developed in the curricular disciplines, as it made learning more meaningful and applicable for students, thus influencing their motivation and the possibilities to learn to act for sustainability [12,13].

**Author Contributions:** L.B. and D.C. both contributed equally to all aspects of the paper. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was developed within the project Change the Story funded by the Erasmus + programme of the EC, grant number 2019-1-UK01-KA201-061432.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. No personal data was collected and all the data was anonymised.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data are available on request to the corresponding author.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors acknowledge the work of all the teachers and students who participated in the Italian piloting of the Change the Story project.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

