Transcript Kein Folientitel

The ENSI project as research into
‘quality’
• The Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI)
project was started in 1986 on the proposal of the
OECD-CERI
• The school practice was at the centre and we were
looking for initiatives that would foster
environmental awareness and students’
development of dynamic qualities such as
initiative, independence, commitment and
readiness to accept responsibility.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
The environmental crisis is a
knowledge crisis
* Complexity was one of the key words in the
ENSI project, to indicate the impossibility to
reduce the environment, living being and the
knowledge itself to a machine or to a
mechanism.
* A discussion on complexity involves the
assumptions of everyday life and of the culture
in which we are often unconsciously immersed.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
The observer is part of the
system
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Compare and contrast
different points of view
• Environmental education offers a
‘global’, ‘systemic’ and interdisciplinary approach because
• it allows dealing with concrete real
issues without simplifying them
beforehand,
• accepting a working method that never
loses sight of the context,
• and that allows comparison and cooperation between viewpoints, value
judgements and disciplines.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Situational knowledge
• Knowledge can only be constructed through an
individual process which gave value and meaning to
experience and communication.
• This context-linked knowledge is meaningful because
it is useful and can be used in real life and not because
it is part of a programme or because it is ‘objective’ or
detached from reality; indeed, it involves value
judgements, expectations and all that which makes an
experience important and meaningful.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Teachers as reflective practitioners
• The teacher’s role must change: from someone who
transmit knowledge to someone who must to learn to
construct significant contexts and to ask ‘legitimate’
questions within which students can actively create their
meanings.
• Confidence shifts from confidence in contents - established
rules, data, methods - to confidence in processes that allow
us not to eliminate but to keep error under control.
• The innovative teacher has to take on the burden of
incompetence.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Action research as a tool for
school development
• Action research envisages a cyclical process
of planning, action, evaluation and
reflection that can apply both to
environmental issues and also to problems
arising in educational innovation.
• Pupils engage in active enquiry and action
in the environment and teachers research
the educational strategies they employ.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
The process of change from
‘classroom initiatives’ to eco-schools
• The school becomes a focal point for knowledge
production that is useful in their neighbourhood: “not just a
library in which to find past information but a centre in
which the community can come together to debate and deal
with problems”.
• EE (or EfS) as education for citizenship, for critical
participation and for taking personal responsibility in
actions and decisions concerning the natural, social,
cultural and economic environment.
• School can become a learning organisation.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Sustainability in schools as
 pedagogical sustainability, related to the school
pedagogical offer: curricula, methods, school
atmosphere, etc.
 organisational
and
communicational
sustainability, between students and teachers
and parents and staff,
 school buildings and school management
sustainability.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
Quality criteria for ECO school
Development
•The SEED-EnSI research will highlight the process
of change from ‘classroom initiatives’ to ecoschools, within a context in which
• the term environment embraces the natural and the
technical environment and the social and intellectual
environment as well;
• the “ecologization” of schools has to be examined at
the three levels of pedagogical, socio-organisational
and technical/economic level;
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau
….other explicit criteria
•particular attention will be given to projects focusing on
the learner as a constructor of his/her own knowledge by
means of intentional and active learning processes - and in
this way enhancing her/his active involvement and role
(dynamic qualities);
•particular attention will be given to projects focused on
the involvement and participation of all the stakeholders,
and on the construction of learning networks which links
schools with families, communities and workplaces.
6-9/XII/2002
Comenius 1 Contact Seminar
Reichenau