<< Background >>Climate change is one of the major challenges EU member countries confront in the 21st century. It has an increasingly direct impact on everyday life; for instance, we all have first-hand experience with the weather, some phenomena that seem to refute the far-reaching process of climate change. Climate change as a global phenomenon is the subject of intense debate in various public spaces, from the scientific to the rumor level. Even though there is a scientific consensus on human contribution to climate change, there are still many misconceptions about it, and due to its nature, mass media overemphasizes the harmful effects of global processes. The emotion it evokes is often a feeling of boredom, on one hand, anxiety and helplessness on the other. When the mass media keeps saying that humanity is rushing to its loss, it transmits hopelessness. The constant threat is detrimental to our mental health. In this respect, younger people are particularly at risk. We can conclude that a flood of misconceptions and fake news is targeting the audience. In the 21st century, a significant source of information for many people is the social media, a much less reliable source. The ability to think critically is crucial and more important than ever before. A critically thinking citizen can navigate among contradictory information, recognizing partial and biased sources. Critical thinking that relies on information from the media should include the understanding of why and how climate action should be taken forward. We also want to raise attention that critical thinking is embedded throughout the eight key competencies necessary for employability, personal fulfilment and health, active and responsible citizenship, and social inclusion outlined by the EU Council. According to the European Skills Agenda, the rapid shift towards a climate-neutral Europe changes the way we work, learn, and live. Europe can only grasp these opportunities if its people develop transversal skills such as critical thinking.Protection of the climate can only be achieved with educators and students who recognize their role in shaping global processes and can work together for a change. Dialogue between members of the local community is essential for this. The community of inquiry allows group members to learn about each other’s thoughts and attitudes about climate change. They experience that everyone’s opinion matters, which creates the basis for joint action. At the same time, they find no easy answers to complex questions such as climate change. During the sessions, their critical thinking develops as they learn about multiple perspectives, and meanwhile, their perspectives can be challenged by the community to which they belong.<< Objectives >>DEXPO/Developing critical thinking skills for protecting the climate - Educational methods for teaching critical thinking and media literacy on climate change is an innovative project to develop teachers’ and educators’ professional knowledge, capacities and skills to teach about climate change with a focus on critical thinking and its media representation, including misconceptions. The main objective of this project is to develop educators’ professional skills to ensure that critical thinking strategies and issues concerning media manipulation are part of the educational setting when teaching on climate change. Therefore, we create learning resources to teach the concept of media, media literacy, and developing critical thinking through creative methods available to use in online spaces and foster learners’ active and responsible engagement in protecting the climate. The project also wants to reach local communities/youths/students with the long term aim for supporting of becoming better-engaged citizens with the ability to analyse media and information critically, to understand better the content, manipulation practices of media, then to draw opinion critically and act as an active and responsible citizen for the interest of the protection of the climate. We aim to create a strong partnership that will last longer and have plans to keep working on climate change education with a global perspective on it and incorporate interactive and engaging methods. In order to broaden our horizons and networks for climate change education, the partner organizations also need to improve their educational resources. Therefore, we aim to learn and adapt new methods that the partners can use in their educational or any other programmes and activities they implement locally or internationally.Accordingly, the project wants to achieve the following objectives:1. Developing and implement educational resources and materials for teaching on climate change and that are freely available online 2. Providing resources and tools for educators’ professional development 3. Supporting the implementation of local projects/actions on the awareness-raising of climate change 4. Creating a solid and long-lasting partnership5. Improving the educational repertoire, services of the participating organizations in the subject of climate change6. Broadening our networks on the local, regional, national and European level with professional groups and communities developing and providing education on climate change<< Implementation >>Our partnership consists of 3 NGOs from Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia and 1 for-profit organisation from Portugal. We have a diverse background in leading international projects on developing and implementing innovation in teaching and learning, supporting community development and initiating local-level projects and actions. This project will expand upon previous projects working with Digital Storytelling (DST), Philosophy for Children/Communities (P4C), the method of Digital Mediation (DM), and two additional Global Education Methods (‘Through other eyes’ and ‘Causes and consequences’). During the 36 months of the project, we will organise two LTTA mobilities to share and learn our already available methods and exchange ideas for developing the productions. We develop and implement 5 Productions. With these productions, we aim to answer the need to support educators for developing future generations’ knowledge, attitude, and capability for thinking and acting on climate change responsibly and fearlessly. We will develop a training scheme (Production 1) intending to improve educators’ professional knowledge, capacities and skills for teaching about climate change with a focus on critical thinking and its media representation, including misconceptions and false news. Within this production development phase, we will organize pilot workshops for educators to further develop the training modules and receive valuable feedback on the applied content and methods of the modules. Next, a long term massive open online course (MOOC) will be developed (Production 2), piloted, and adapted for all partners’ national context during the project. The main goal is to equip teachers and educators with a tool they can use independently and individually, flexible on time. We want to engage local communities in the project and, in this way, offer opportunities for them to contribute to the protection of climate change by working on awareness-raising, initiating local actions with the focus on having dialogue, discussions on climate change. Thus, within the implementation of Production 3, the project partners support creating and implementing small-scale projects on local levels by communities (groups of students, young people or adults). We design and write a digital Educational Toolkit (Production 4) for educators, multipliers. This educational resource provides a detailed description and interpretation of those educational materials presented and learnt by the partners during the international meetings. It also provides educational resources for online teaching. Finally, as an intention to ensure that all the outputs we create during the project will be available free to use after the project lifetime, we want to set up digital space, an online educational platform, to reach educators and other professionals interested in media literacy education in general and to teach this subject online. The primary function of this website is to offer open-source materials to improve media literacy education and education on the subject of climate change using the creative methods partners shared and transformed into Training schemes (P1) and the developed Educational Toolkits (P4). The platform will host the MOOC (P2) in all languages developed during the project; therefore, it will maintain the sustainability of all project materials.<< Results >>As a result, we will have a collection of valuable resources and best practices that we can offer for educators who want to learn and teach on the subject of climate change with a particular focus on its media representation and responsible and critical thinking on it. The outputs of productions' development within this project include a Training scheme in 5 languages, 12 locally implemented projects with video/photo reports and case studies, a freely available MOOC in 5 languages, approx. 35-40 page digital Educational Toolkit designed for educators in 5 languages, and an Online Educational platform in 5 language sections. The educational resources and multiplication events for promoting the completed results will directly reach all together at least 60-70 educators/partners and at least 40-60 students/youths/community/partner through the locally implemented projects. Upon completing the project, we will keep promoting the educational materials through the online educational platforms, partners’ website, newsletter and social community channels to a broader professional community of educators/community leaders, youth workers and trainers. In this way, the partnership expects to reach 3000-4000 persons/partners. Using the educational resources produced in this project, we expect that educators will become proficient in implementing the pedagogical methods in their work and encourage learners to engage with a variety of issues on climate change with a critical analysis. All the final versions of the results will be available for free on the online platform, which will benefit other stakeholders, schools and educational organizations in the long term. An important outcome for the participating partners will be to raise their profile and broaden networking on the local, regional, national and European level with other stakeholders, professional groups and communities of educators in an area of growing interest and concern. They will expand on the resources available to educators interested in climate change and media literacy, global education and critical thinking. They will also learn new methods shared within the project, which they can implement in future projects, therefore benefit them in the long term.