Abstract
ENCOMPASS (ENgaging and orienting the young in the COMPlexity of climAte change and Sustainability) is a research project funded under the Italian PRIN PNRR programme. Coordinated by the University of Bologna, together with Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan) and the University of Verona, the project aims to address how young people can be supported to become active, informed agents of change in the context of climate change and sustainability. ENCOMPASS brings together philosophy, economics, and science education to investigate how knowledge, beliefs, and behaviours interact, and how educational systems can foster transformative agency in students. The project aims to unpack the concept of agency related to climate action and deliberation on societally relevant choices. It seeks to develop innovative approaches, tools, and guidelines for science education to better equip students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to respond to complex socio-ecological challenges and to participate effectively in individual and collective climate actions. ENCOMPASS will deliver theoretical frameworks, educational tools, teaching and learning designs, and recommendations for school curricula that integrate agency and sustainability competences. Expected outcomes include bridging knowledge–behaviour gaps among young people, fostering responsible and informed participation, and ultimately contributing to the development of more resilient, inclusive, and democratic societies through science education.
Results achieved
: The ENCOMPASS project developed, tested and refined a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework to investigate how science education can support young people in navigating the complexity of climate change and in developing informed, reflective and situated forms of agency. The project brought science education, philosophy and economics into dialogue, while valuing the specificity and complementarity of their respective perspectives. One of the main scientific outcomes of the project is the development of the ENCOMPASS framework for climate agency. The framework conceptualises agency as a relational, situated and multidimensional process. The framework is organised around three lenses: the epistemic-driven lens concerns the capacity to construct, use and critically examine scientific knowledge, models, data and evidence, while recognising their conditions of validity and degrees of uncertainty; the ethical-reflective lens concerns reflection on values, responsibility, equity, climate justice and the intergenerational consequences of decisions; the systemic-pragmatic lens concerns the understanding of interdependencies among environmental, social, economic and institutional systems, together with the evaluation of constraints, resources, consequences and possible levers for intervention. A key theoretical advancement lies in the recognition that these dimensions operate through processes of resonance. ENCOMPASS conceptualises agency as a capacity for orientation within a space composed of knowledge, values, relationships, structures and possibilities. This result addresses an important area of development within science education research. Studies on climate change education have frequently investigated conceptual understanding, misconceptions and the relationship between knowledge and individual behaviour. Research on action competence, participation and transformative agency has also highlighted the importance of engagement, responsibility and collective action. ENCOMPASS connects these areas by showing that engagement with models, data, causality, complexity and uncertainty forms an integral part of climate agency. The theoretical results were translated into the project deliverables through a coherent set of scientific, methodological and educational products. These included design principles for agency-oriented learning environments, interdisciplinary teaching and learning sequences for upper-secondary education, and activities focused on climate system modelling, causal relationships, feedback processes, systems mapping, scenario interpretation and the assessment of mitigation and adaptation strategies. The deliverables also included structured activities for discussion and deliberation on responsibility, justice, distribution of resources, costs, incentives, conflicts and the consequences of decisions. The project developed tools for the integrated collection and analysis of questionnaires, narratives, written productions, causal maps, observations and group discussions. These outputs provide a conceptual and methodological infrastructure that can support the design, observation and analysis of climate change education programmes beyond the duration of the project. The school-based interventions involved upper-secondary students in activities combining scientific modelling, analysis of complexity, philosophical reflection and economic and systemic evaluation of climate strategies. The findings indicate a strengthening of students’ understanding of climate change, especially in relation to their capacity to connect causes, consequences, feedback processes, actors and levels of decision-making. A particularly relevant outcome concerns the ways in which knowledge was organised, connected and mobilised. Students’ productions showed the emergence of increasingly systemic interpretations in which scientific, ethical, economic and political dimensions of climate change were understood as interdependent components of the same issue. In the final phase of data analysis, attention was directed towards the configurations through which the three lenses resonated within students’ arguments, narratives and decision-making processes. In some cases, a strong mobilisation of the epistemic dimension supported understanding and position-taking, while possibilities for collective or institutional intervention remained less developed. In other cases, scientific knowledge, ethical evaluation and systemic reasoning were more closely integrated, leading to more articulated forms of deliberation. Further configurations revealed a strong ethical sensitivity that expanded the perceived relevance of the issue and opened broader questions about responsibility and justice. Other profiles highlighted the role of socio-economic and institutional constraints in supporting realistic and strategic reasoning, while also revealing the importance of strengthening students’ capacity to imagine transformative possibilities within complex systems. These findings show that agency develops through different configurations, depending on which dimensions enter resonance and which remain less connected. Scientific understanding may coexist with a limited sense of efficacy; ethical awareness may precede the identification of viable strategies; and recognition of structural constraints may support strategic reasoning while calling for further work on collective and institutional possibilities. The analysis therefore made it possible to investigate how students construct the possibility of action, how they connect knowledge, values and structures, and which forms of intervention they can imagine within specific contexts. ENCOMPASS developed an integrated research approach capable of combining quantitative and qualitative data while preserving the complexity of agency as an educational construct. The analytical framework makes it possible to examine which perspective initially activates students’ reasoning, which disciplinary dimensions enter into resonance, which configuration of agency becomes possible, which aspects remain less developed, and which tensions remain open between knowledge and decision-making, individual responsibility and collective action, and the desirability and viability of proposed solutions. This approach supports an analysis of agency as an outcome of the interaction among learners, activities, knowledge, languages, relationships and institutional conditions. It provides a basis for examining how educational environments create opportunities for students to interpret complex issues, position themselves and participate in processes of deliberation. The scientific value of ENCOMPASS lies in placing agency at the centre of climate change science education while maintaining a strong connection with disciplinary knowledge. Overall, the project produced a theoretical, empirical and methodological advancement in the field of climate change education. It identified the configurations and resonances of agency as a relevant object of research and developed tools for investigating how educational environments can expand the space of possibilities perceived by students. In this perspective, school becomes a space in which young people can learn to understand, deliberate and orient themselves responsibly within worlds shaped by complexity, uncertainty and transformation. The project was funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and the PRIN 2022 PNRR programme.Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Giulia Tasquier
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia "Augusto Righi"
Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 224.919,00
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 82.124,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
30/11/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
