Act! It is your responsibility

‘Do you sort your waste for recycling?’ was the fi rst question pupils at Secondary School Isidra de Guzmán asked their peers in a school survey. No one said ‘yes’ and 81% said ‘no’. This gave the class a sense of the grandeur of the task before them as they embarked on their communication campaign to make their peers more energy-aware. What they also found out was that half of those surveyed did have some understanding of the importance of water conservation, the need for this seeming more obvious and connected to their daily lives. When it came to energy conservation the majority “did not believe their behaviour to be important”.
The team concluded that the pupils at their school ‘know how to do it, but do not feel the need to do it’. Communications stemmed from there and after defi ning their messages and developing their strategy, the class began organising lively workshops, interesting exhibitions, contests, panels, a fun digital game and an informative website. They also joined external campaigns such as ‘Lights for Learning’ and ‘Earth Hour’, worked their Facebook contacts and championed programmes for the recycling of old equipment and clothes.
An empowering part of the project for the class was a visit to the local city hall where they attended a session on how to deliver workshops. The class learned about adapting their message to their audience and as a result, dressed up as mother nature for a set of “rucksack days” with younger pupils at the school. Lack of funding sometimes made implementation a challenge, but they managed to find solutions. For example, a great idea for an energy awareness photo exhibitionproved too expensive to produce so they did it virtually.
It is a campaign of raising awareness based on the own curriculum and the educational basic competitions, which it departs from the own experience of the pupils and in which they have all the protagonism. Workshops, exhibitions, contests, panels and cartels, creation of didactic materials, games for digital slate, videoes, graffitis, wikis, glosters, photographic virtual exhibitions, digital books and a length etc. They have been some of the activities and materials realized for this campaign, always from the playful thing, from the own language of the juvenile culture and innovative use of technology for the education.