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Description
Civic engagement in sustainability problematic often stems from a personal experience of being affected or moved by the effects of the ecological crisis, rather than from information alone. However, current education, especially at universities, is considerably biased towards theoretical information is rather weak at promoting knowledge and experience that might forge ecological citizens. Besides deep ecology, the project will draw from the Norwegian friluftsliv philosophy, Czech tradition of outdoor experiential education and philosophy of nature and corporeality, but also from the fields of arts and environmental aesthetics.
Involved teachers will share their knowledge and experience during peer-learning workshops, they will study and be trained in innovative approaches, with the focus on direct embodied methods of approaching nature, and will cooperate to utilize them in university education. Main output will be an innovative education programme consisting of relatively independent modules that the partners will combine according to their needs to create a new course at Czech universities, an innovated course at the University of Oslo, and a new experiential tour at Sluňákov. The program will cultivate the students’ and participants’ perceptiveness to nonhuman surroundings, direct knowledge of nature, personal relation to it and deep reflection of it. It will deepen theoretical knowledge and root it in personal experience. In the longterm, this might strongly influence their sense of personal involvement in both the local and global environmental issues and through that lead to their civic engagement anchored in personal motivation and deep understanding.
Summary of project results
The project took as its starting point the challenges facing environmental education in the rapidly changing world of the Anthropocene. The partners found a common interest in bridging and finding synergies between knowledge, experience, art and activism to educate towards deepening the relation of students with the more-than-human world. This may lead to strengthening of their concern for and engagement in environmental issues.
The focal point of the project was developing a practice of deep ecology and ecophilosophy through experiential and body-based education methods and updating it for the current time. We exchanged, researched, studied, trained and tested these methods and subsequently applied them in the form of educational innovations. The first stage was done in close collaboration of the partners through four intense, week-long, peer-learning workshops and through regular online discussions. During the implementation stage, each of the partners worked more independently on their respective innovations to tailor them to their needs. In the end, we reflected on the innovations on a last peer-learning workshop and presented them and our experience from applying and pilot-testing the innovations to various groups of teachers, environmental education lectors and psychotherapists.
Main results of the project are a plethora of new skills and knowledge acquired by the involved teachers, and the particular innovations. In the case of Masaryk University and Palacký University a new course was developed and included into the curriculum of the undergraduate programmes. This brought in experiential and body-based methods that were missing from the curricula before. The course was immensely successful and met its goals of enkindling in students’ new ways of knowing the world around us, developing their relation to a place and strengthening their engagement in environmental problems. Centre for ecological activities Sluňákov, although having a rather small role in the project, also benefited from the exchanged and researched methods and expanded their portfolio of programmes for their open-air gallery by a new experiential tour. And finally, in the case of the University of South-East Norway, they used the methods and the experience from the project to innovate two courses from their curriculum by better bridging practice and theory and adding more experiential and outdoor education methods to ecophilosophy teaching. Besides that, the project facilitated renewing and forging new contacts and collaborations in the fields of deep ecology and ecophilosophy, and even led to an inception of a new research-educational project on the intersection of philosophy and traditional crafts.
Towards the end of the project period, we also organised a small conference of deep ecology methods in education and therapy and presented the results and the methods in various other educational and therapeutic circles. As the experience of both Czech and Norwegian universities indicates, the methods this project focused on – experiential, body-based, rooted in deep ecology – may play crucial role in the context of the ecological crisis and can support active engagement of the students in environmental problems. The project also (re)invigorated interest in deep ecology in both Czech Republic and Norway with prospects for further development.
Summary of bilateral results
The collaboration with the donor project partners was crucial for us, as we needed to come in contact with the tradition of deep ecology in education and have an opportunity to discuss it theoretically and methodologically with people with experience in using deep-ecological approaches. With regard to the future, we remain in close contact with our Norwegian colleague, and we plan to continue exchanging our experience and further developments. As it was already mentioned, the project induced an interest in consolidating and furthering the practice of deep ecology both in Norway and the Czech Republic.