Edukatu

Creating pedagogical materials, practices and methodologies for educators and students; Share successful initiatives highlighting conscious consumption practices at home, school or communities; Promote the exchange of experiences and knowledge on conscious consumption and sustainability amongst the participants Edukatu is the first learning network, in Brazil, on conscious consumption and sustainability. It offers a free on-line platform for teachers and 6 to 15 years old students in public schools to voluntarily adhere to a learning process which is fun for students and rigorous for teachers. It provides multimedia contents for them to engage in educational activities and in the exchange of knowledge. It helps students to understand the value of empathy and helps them to use their acts of consumption to positively transform the environment and society when buying, using and discarding products or services. This technological, dynamic, collaborative and non-hierarchical proposal is complemented by challenges with awards offered to teachers and students to stimulate dialogic educational processes, autonomy of the students and mobilization of the school community. More at http://bit.ly/2op8NNJ The platform has 65,000 pageviews and 14,000 unique visitors per month (average for 2016). At least 6,000 teachers and 22,000 students in 2,800 schools are registered and directly engaged with the project. Due to the lack of computers at some public schools, sometimes 4 or 5 students use one computer at the same time to access the platform, with only one student registered, which multiplies by 4 or 5 the number of students engaged. Where in person capacity building workshops are offered to teachers, numbers grow: in the state of Alagoas, a partnership with a local NGO resulted in 20% of the schools engaged; in the State of Roraima, a partnership with the Secretary of Education resulted in 70% of the schools engaged; in the state of São Paulo, a partnership with the Municipal Secretary of Education of the Municipality of São Paulo resulted in 8% of the more than 12,000 schools engaged. Presently, the main challenge is to stimulate teachers and students to engage with Edukatu in each and every year of the education cycle, so to guarantee the internalization of sustainability values and of conscious consumption behaviors. New strategies and additional partnerships are being designed to achieve this objective, such as influencing federal public policy to include the theme in the obligatory curriculum for schools and influencing state and municipal education Secretaries to establish bonuses for teachers who continuously use the platform. In addition, we have future plans to extend the project to High School (students from 15 to 17 years of age).