The school is the ideal place to embark on the journey of emotional and cultural exploration that protecting the environment and caring for the “common home” brings. It is a place of culture and global citizenship, and as such, it is important that it be a spokesperson for community values. This is the origin of the project “Hydro Comics & Podcasts in Piana Rotaliana” implemented by the Econtrovertia APS association together with three classes from institutes in Piana Rotaliana (I.C. di Mezzocorona, Istituto Martini di Mezzolombardo and Centro Istruzione e Formazione della Fondazione E. Mach) as part of the Area Youth Plan 2023-24 of Piana Rotaliana and with the support of Fondazione Caritro. 

The aim of the project is to raise awareness of the importance of sustainable water resource management in an area, that of the Piana Rotaliana, whose multiple stakeholders must find an agreement that starts, first and foremost, from the sharing of intentions. The sixty young people, thanks to the collaboration of associations, freelancers, environmental agencies in the area and research centers, told the story of the relationship, over time, of a community with its territory and water resources.

Each group, one per school, focused on the community-water relationship over time, integrating real events with new elements and fictional characters creating an exemplary environmental education product in the form of a comic book and podcast. 

Class 3 GAT, together with their CLIL Biology and Ecology teacher, Barbara Centis, focused on the future scenario and then worked on four stories representative of the snowless Trentino context and an increasingly dry Piana Rotaliana. After meeting with the technical experts to fully understand the issues, the sixteen students were divided into four groups that created four entertaining scenarios titled, respectively, “A Fight for Santa Giustina,” “One of Those Days,” “For a Fistful of Blue Votes,” and “All is Not Lost.” Once the scripts of the stories were created, they were turned into comic books-the idea is a winner as this tool is suitable for attracting the attention of young people. The comic strips were also told in a podcast: this method is an optimal solution to make the message reach many people, even beyond the local area.

As in an ideal school citizenship project, the “Hydro Comics & Podcasts in Piana Rotaliana” project allows teaching a method: in addition to the products created, in fact, students were able to question what methods and tools are effective for reaching stakeholders and what are the truly effective methods for good environmental education. Given the core of the Environment and Territory Management articulation of the Education and Training Center of Fondazione E. Mach, the project emerges as an ideal means of acquiring hard but also soft skills to truly create a citizen ready to live in a world that can only be saved with a sustainable approach.