Hello again! We are five student from Utrecht University who for the past few months have been participating in the Erasmus+ Project Shape2Gether, an initiative to teach students how to communicate complex information relating to climate change using new media technologies. Our adventure began earlier this year in the city of Tautra, Norway; you can find our reflection on our experiences here. This piece is a retrospective of the second ‘summer school,’ which took place on the islands of Malta in late October.

The Shape2Gether Erasmus+ project aims to implement innovative approaches in the education for sustainable development in the context of climate change and its impacts on Europe by bringing together three groups of partner specialisations, i.e. geosciences, new technologies, and serious game design. Researchers involved in the project are Bouke van Gorp (UU project lead, Faculty of Geosciences) and René Glas(Faculty of Humanities). For more info, see here.

Our journey began on Gozo, the second-largest of Malta’s three isles. As we stood on the deck of the ferry ploughing through the waves of the Mediterranean, we fell into conversation about what to expect from the week ahead. The theme of this particular summer school was Education for Sustainable Development—how could we as academics communicate the interlinkages between environmental, societal, cultural, and economic sustainability using new media technologies? We did not yet know, and it would take a week of interviews, workshops, and brainstorming to find out.

Our three days on Gozo were spent travelling around the island and uncovering the various stakeholders and factors inherent to the four aspects of sustainability. We visited the Food Village of Magro Group, one of the major processors and distributors of Maltese tomato-based products, in order to learn about the considerations that go into balancing cultural heritage with economic viability; we were led around the government farm in Xewkija, which is exploring means of preserving traditional Maltese plants and animals in the face of a harsher climate; we meditated along the gorgeous coast of Dwejra, whose iconic Azure Window collapsed into the ocean in 2017; and we explored the Ġgantija Archaeological Park, which is host to structures more than 5000 years old. Each of these experiences, alongside many others, gradually started filling in a complete picture of the state of sustainability in Malta, and the various difficulties and complications entangled within it.

Having assembled a more complete impression of what was at stake within the islands, it was time to put that knowledge to use. We travelled to our hosts’ university campus in Msida, close to Malta’s capital city of Valletta, and got to work on the main project for the summer school: a multi-modal product that would represent, at least in part, the state of Maltese sustainability, the ways in which its four aspects interacted with one another, and how individuals could take concrete action in support of them. In line with this we were divided into four large groups consisting of a student from each of the eight participating universities. Not only did this encourage careful planning and role allocation, but it also enabled a fertile exchange of ideas, perspectives, and cultural considerations.

We all agree that working with seven other people was complicated at first. Everybody had their own ideas, and nobody was willing to take charge—to do so seemed to be to silence the opinions of everybody else. However, as the week continued and everybody settled more comfortably into their roles, it grew easier and easier to construct concrete plans and divide tasks equally among the group. Very quickly everybody was working away on research, programming, and writing, fleshing out their idea from a concept into a product that had something to say. These products ranged in form from a Story Map that acted as an interactive lesson on water in Gozo, to an environment for policymakers to explore a strategy for reducing social inequalities, to a holistic overview and interactive tour of cultural institutions and locations, to a hypertext fiction game that puts you in the shoes of the Maltese government, trying to balance sustainability with tourism. This last product was partially made by Aengus and Aria, and you can find it here if you want to play it for yourself.

By the end of the week we had assembled a collection of products to be proud of and developed a much better grasp of both contextual and skill-based knowledge: starting from the ground up with interviews, tours, and field research on sustainability, and then synthesising that into a whole through iteration and the exchange of ideas. We all feel as though these are concrete skills that we can adopt and apply elsewhere, hopefully in other contexts and with different tools. As part of this, we are especially excited to travel to the third in final summer school in March, which takes place in Bochum. This third instalment focuses specifically upon games as a mode of communication and pedagogical potential. Games are especially well-suited to representing systems—such as climate change—by way of their predication upon inputs, processes, and outputs. We’ll let you know how that goes in our final reflection piece.

Before closing, we would like to highlight one experience in particular that struck a resonant chord within us. On the final day of the programme we travelled to the coast in order to conduct a beach cleanup. As we stooped and scrambled around within the ostensibly clean sand, we quickly came to realise how much pollution there in fact was: bottle caps, cigarette stubs, fishing line, and more. It was sobering to realise how much, as one of us puts it, “of a stupid tourist [we] can be sometimes.” The second half of the experience was more uplifting: we were treated to the lovely surprise of watching three rescued turtles being released back to sea! We all stood in an arc surrounding the water, cheering on the little guys as they shimmied and flopped their way over the sand, only to eventually glide into the water and set off gracefully into the blue Mediterranean. Both of these memories stand out to us because of how visceral they were: it’s one thing to abstractly understand the impact of humans (both negative and positive) upon an environment, and quite another to feel that.

On that note, come back in four months, when we’ll post our reflection on the final summer school in Bochum!

Written by: Aengus Schutte, Aria Mohsenimotlagh, Inge van Noort, Isabel Rump, and Mick Raamsteeboers