Annalisa Pacini

Teaching can contribute substantially to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by addressing traditional curriculum-relevant topics in new contexts related to sustainability. A suitable context is green facades, which support several SDGs at once. The aim of sustainability education should be to foster all components of the KAP triad, i.e., not only promoting environmental knowledge (K) and attitude (A) but also enabling appropriate practices (P). This study analyzes the effect of a short-term didactic intervention on green facades (4 h) on the KAP triad. Pre-, post-, and follow-up tests were conducted with n = 71 students aged M = 14.19 (SD = 1.54). Knowledge and attitude development were analyzed using ANOVA. Regression analyses were calculated to assess the relations of knowledge and attitude with practices. The results show that even a short-term intervention can lead to longer-term effects regarding knowledge growth but will only bring about short-term changes in attitude. Attitude items with the strongest change were not related to students’ direct or immediate activities. In addition, environmental knowledge and attitude appear to support different kinds of activities. Therefore, it seems important that didactic interventions focus on knowledge and attitude to enable students to engage in pro-environmental behaviors.

Teaching can contribute substantially to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by addressing traditional curriculum-relevant topics in new contexts related to sustainability. A suitable context is green facades, which support several SDGs at once. The aim of sustainability education should be to foster all components of the KAP triad, i.e., promoting environmental knowledge (K) and attitude (A), but also enabling appropriate practices (P). This study analyzes the effect of a short-term extracurricular intervention (4 hours) on green facades on the KAP triad. Pre-, post- and follow-up tests were conducted with n = 71 students aged M = 14.20 (SD = 1.33). Knowledge and attitude development were analyzed using ANOVA. Regression analyses were calculated to assess the relations of knowledge and attitude with practices. The results show that even a short-term intervention can lead to longer-term effects regarding knowledge growth but will only bring about short-term changes in attitude. Attitude items with the strongest change were not related to students’ direct or immediate activities. In addition, environmental knowledge and attitude appear to support different kinds of activities. Therefore, it seems important that didactic interventions focus on knowledge and attitude to enable students to engage in pro-environmental behaviors.

The promotion of Climate Literacy is a central concern of our time. To achieve this ability, one can draw on different content areas. One possible area is Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), such as Vertical Greening Systems (VGS), and their effectiveness in mitigating climate change. However, VGS is not yet an established topic in environmental education, even if the pro-environmental effectiveness of VGS has been proven from a scientific point of view and this topic is close to everyday life. To facilitate the transfer of knowledge from research to school, this paper presents an example of a possible procedure. This procedure starts with a narrative review of the scientific literature on VGS. Then, the main results of this review are related to the Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Literacy, and general educational goals to capture its educational relevance. Finally, a flow chart for a teaching sequence is developed, with the phase sequence derived from the performed narrative review. Thus, a parallelism between the structure of a scientific review and an action-oriented environmental education becomes visible. To what extent this parallelization may be generalized, and whether teaching based on it is effective, will have to be tested.