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Poster Short Abstract

The Greek implementation of the SchoolFan citizen science project offered online and face-to-face training for secondary teachers. This poster outlines the shared structure, rationale, and activities used to prepare teachers to guide their students in analyzing climate misinformation effectively.

Poster Abstract

This poster presents the teacher training approach implemented in Greece within the SchoolFan project, a European citizen science project that engages school communities in recognizing and analyzing climate misinformation on social media. In the Greek implementation, the professional development program was delivered to two groups of secondary education teachers. One group participated online, and the other attended the program face-to-face, following an identical instructional sequence.

The training introduced teachers to the core SchoolFan methodology, which applies citizen science principles to classroom inquiry. This approach positions teachers and students as active contributors to the investigation of digital environments. Participants worked with sample hashtags and climate-related posts, practiced identifying misinformation patterns, examined markers of source credibility, and applied the project’s reliability scale. Through collaborative tasks, teachers enacted the inquiry cycle used in citizen science activities, including systematic observation, classification, evidence-based judgement, and shared reflection.

Alongside the components, the training examined the theoretical foundations that connect citizen science with climate education. These included the participatory nature of citizen science as a mechanism for collective knowledge-building, inquiry-based learning as a structure for guiding investigations, and dimensions of digital literacy for navigating climate information online. Teachers received the SchoolFan classroom materials and the step-by-step lesson sequence designed to transfer this citizen science process to teaching contexts.

By outlining the design, content, and pedagogical grounding of the Greek SchoolFan training programme, the poster demonstrates how citizen science methodologies can strengthen teacher professional development and support systematic, collaborative analysis of online climate information in schools.