FARCE

Using Satire and Comedy to Promote Climate Change Awareness

The FARCE project and partnership was put together for two main reasons; to explore how comedy might be used as an educational response to the ongoing crisis of climate change, and to provide quality resources for adult educators addressing a gap in current provision. Partners already understood the power of comedy in raising awareness, but as front line education and training organisations they realised that there was very little, if any, available instruction about how to use comedy or satire in education.

The objectives of the FARCE Project were to:

Share pedagogical best practice for those working in formal, informal and non-formal adult educational settings, and to address climate change issues using new satirical and comedic techniques.

Develop a fully accessible Comedy Compendium of satirical resources that will address a number of topics of the climate challenge.

Develop bespoke in service training and Continuous Professional Development for those working in formal, informal and non-formal adult educational settings, addressing the climate change challenge by using humour based methods

Results

The FARCE - Compendium of Comedy consists of 49 individual comedy pieces addressing climate change issues in a fun and meaningful way. The FARCE partners have developed a wide variety of comedy pieces, video sketches, audio narrations, print articles, performances and artistic works. Each of these resources is accompanied by a lesson plan to implement and achieve the desired learning outcomes.

The FARCE In-Service Training Using Satire and Comedy to Promote Climate Change Awareness has been designed to introduce the topic of comedy and performance as an educational vehicle. The training represents a new approach in Continuing Professional Development for professionals and educators to support them in integrating the new FARCE approaches and transversal skills including critical thinking on the topic of climate change education into their day-to-day working lives.

The FARCE MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) is the main place of interaction and the central hosting repository of the FARCE Learning Resources. The MOOC has been designed as a sequential, interactive step-by-step course aimed at creating a community of lifelong learners and professionals with interests in environmental action, education, comedy and performance.