From Passive Learners to Active Creators
At the Liceo delle Scienze Umane “Regina Margherita” in Palermo, a teacher named Rosaria Cascio set out to do something unusual: she asked her class of 27 girls, aged 15 to 16, to stop being consumers of information about the UN 2030 Agenda and become its producers instead. The result was Podcast Agenda 2030 — a 17-episode audio series, each approximately ten minutes long, exploring the key themes of the UN Sustainable Development Goals through the voices, research, and reflections of the students themselves.
The project was born from a frustration that many teachers of sustainability recognise: studying the SDGs in a traditional way can feel abstract, distant, and even contradictory — students struggle to see the connection between a global agenda’s aspirations and the realities they observe in their own lives and communities. Cascio’s solution was to turn the study of the SDGs into an act of creation and communication, making each student not a passive recipient of pre-packaged knowledge but a builder of content and study pathways.
Seventeen Episodes, Seventeen SDGs
Each episode of the podcast dives into one of the 17 SDGs — from poverty alleviation to climate action, gender equality to partnerships for development. The students researched their topics, developed scripts, recorded their voices, and produced a series that they then shared with peers in schools across Italy. The podcast became a tool for study that felt genuinely relevant: the students had made it themselves, they understood why each topic mattered, and they were invested in communicating it well.
The educational approach that made this possible required a particular quality of listening and responsiveness from the teacher. Cascio listened to the students’ language and their intentions, then built a learning path that made each one of them responsible for the outcome. The shift from passivity to authorship was the transformation at the heart of the project.
A Nationally Recognised Practice
The project’s impact extended far beyond the school in Palermo. The podcast was presented in schools in Palermo, Noto, Lumezzane, Monreale, Casalgrande, Reggio Emilia, and Castelfranco. It received coverage in the national press, earned second place in the national Digital Changemaking contest among audio productions in Italian high schools in 2024, and received nominations for several additional awards. The students who created it went on to share their experience as practitioners of good practice — young people teaching other young people how to make sustainability real.
Relevance for Sustainable Learning
Podcast Agenda 2030 connects to all 17 SDGs by design, but its most direct resonances are with SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). It is a powerful example of student-led, creative, non-formal learning that bridges formal school curricula with genuine civic and communicative agency.
Website: sites.google.com/view/agenda2030podcast
Contact: Rosaria Cascio – rosariacascio65@gmail.com
