Change the story is an Erasmus+ funded partnership project with the aim to support teachers and their 9-16 year-old students to produce digital stories about the climate crisis and give young people a voice (Blau & Shamir-Inbal, 2018). The project involved 5 partners (UK, Turkey, Italy, Hungary and Austria) and included the preparation, co-creation and sharing of resources so that teachers and students could engage in their investigations by connecting insights from the past and the present with future scenarios.

In this partnership we identified ‘layers of communities’ (Triggs & John, 2004; Wenger 1998), teams of teachers, IT-specialists, environmental experts, teacher educators, students and researchers who contributed to shape resources and insights. Their activities were not necessarily characterized by linearity but rather nested opportunities, heightened also through the huge challenges imposed by the global pandemic. Due to this challenge in particular the teachers and students had to adapt to achieve the project aims while dealing with the challenges of school closures and remote teaching (Müller & Goldenberg, 2021). Despite this the project achieved its aims to support young people to produce a variety of digital stories to share concerns, suggestions and calls for changes to save the planet. One of our nested layer activities included that we had to evaluate the outcomes the project. We applied an OAL approach (Open Assessment of Learning), which describes the process of learning verification and feedback. The assessment took place collaboratively and was mediated by free access tools in which assessment resources were used, adapted and reshaped to meet personal needs, learning styles and contexts (Chiappe & Adame, 2017).

Part of the assessment for learning strategy was to use a tool that would build student voice through self-reflection. This was a key aspect to support students to become more autonomous learners. The ability to reflect on their own actions and emotions should assist them develop the capacity to judge the quality of their own performance and results (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011).  This presentation will share the outcomes from students using this assessment tool (a rubric) that was developed by the partners, shared with the teachers and used by the students in the context setting of Austria.

We present the analysis of 54 rubrics completed by students in Austria who were from three different classes. Forty-three students attended the lower secondary school level, and eleven of the upper level. Learners at the upper level rated themselves better than those at the lower levels, which may be attributed to students’ confidence in their prior knowledge. The majority of the students felt that they “learned about how people in the past have succeeded in making a change” and “have also understood the importance of every single person when it comes to making a change”. The students gave the criteria "sharing examples for action" (6) their second highest average value (2,24) and identified that they felt able to tell other people what they should and can do about the climate crisis. Students from all three school levels rated their learning progress below average in the area "engaging with the community" (8) (average value=1,59) reflecting the impact of the pandemic in Austria and the inability to connect and communicate with people outside school. The results from the rubric were valuable feedback for the teachers as well as the project partners.

The aim of the project was and is to build competencies in young people to communicate their concerns and suggestions about the future climate on our planet through digital stories. Building these abilities included also building young people’s abilities of self-reflection. For that reason, we introduced a rubric as a self-reflection tool, that was jointly developed by the project partners and through the feedback of the teachers. The rubric can be identified as a boundary object (Wenger 1998) that connected the layers of communities in this partnership. The rubric was of different value for the different groups. While it helped the researchers to get a sense of how well the project was received by the students, the teachers learned through the feedback how project work that is usually hard to assess could be evaluated. For the students that rubric represented a final step in the project work, prompting them to reflect on their experiences. The ambition of the project partners was to provide resources to teachers and students and jointly identify how to support young people to become changemakers. The rubric reified these ambitions in the Austrian context. Reifications such as the rubric connected different layers of community of practice but held different meanings for each group.

Chiappe, A., & Adame, S. I. (2017). Open Educational Practices: a learning way beyond free access knowledge. Ensaio: Avaliação e Políticas Públicas em Educação, 26, 213-230. Blau, I., & Shamir-Inbal, T. (2018). Digital technologies for promoting “student voice” and co-creating learning experience in an academic course. Instructional Science, 46(2), 315-336. Müller, L. M., & Goldenberg, G. (2020). Education in times of crisis: The potential implications of school closures for teachers and students. A review of research evidence on school closures and international approaches to education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chartered College of Teaching. Retrieved on, 2(6), 2020. Triggs, P., & John, P. (2004). From transaction to transformation: information and communication technology, professional development and the formation of communities of practice. Journal of computer assisted learning, 20(6), 426-439. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning as a social system. Systems thinker, 9(5), 2-3. Zimmerman, B. J., & Schunk, D. H. (2011). Handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance. New York, NY: Routledge.