A project to promote water awareness and transformative education for sustainable development

Funded by:

Aims

Aqua Citizens is a project funded by the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU) in the field of 'transformative' education for sustainable development (ESD).

The project involves cooperation between the Regional Environmental Education Centre (RUZ) Oldenburg, the Oldenburg-East Frisian Water Association (OOWV) and the physics didactics departments of the Universities of Oldenburg and Rostock.

The starting point of the project is the realisation that water is both an elementary basis for human life and a potential threat. This means that water poses key challenges for a sustainable future. Aqua Citizens is designed as a citizen science project and is supplemented by mobile school laboratory programmes.

Mobile and stationary laboratory programmes

In the current project phase, we are following the successful concept of previous mobile school laboratory programmes: We visit youth centres and schools to carry out experiments together with children and young people; this time specifically on the topic of water.

At the same time, we use the stationary educational programmes offered by the RUZ, the university and the OOWV - including the waterworks and the drinking water nature trail in Nethen and the 'Kaskade' museum/info centre in Diekmannshausen.

We encourage young people to take part in other free water-related educational programmes. This includes mobile events and group visits to the university, the RUZ or the OOWV. We organise the trips and cover some of the costs.

Citizens Science

Interested children and young people are actively involved in a later phase of the project: For example, they document extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall or dry spells. And they interview citizens and schoolchildren about how they deal with water. In doing so, they help decide which topics should be investigated in greater depth and which needs for change should be focussed on.

Based on this, they develop their own proposals for sustainable water use and thus encourage citizens, pupils and local politicians to take action.