Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2021 9:27:56 GMT
In 1997 eight schools in the South Wales Garw Valley, and 15 teachers, participated in Green Garw, a project, initiated by the Garw Community Council. The objective was to engage schools and the families they served with local plans for sustainable development (Green Garw). To this end the EU funded a pilot to test idea of establishing school/community ECO-Learning Centres (ELCs) throughout Wales.
An educational milestone in this direction was Rescue Mission Planet Earth. This is a syllabus for managing human ecology for sustainable development produced by young people invited to the first 1992 Environment Summit. They carved out a young person's Agenda 21 and illustrated it with their art work and poetry. Both, Green Garw and Rescue Mission are based on the educational principle 'that what's flowing can be shared'. In particular, by combining these two initiatives young people of the Garw Valley were given an opportunity to shape their future environment in a manner that was in keeping with their own traditions and surroundings in the context of an international network of schools and their communities. Both elements are forceful examples of the importance of community heritage in an expanding culture of decarbonisation and demomstrate the application of arts reasoning to explain sustainability.
The outcome (1997-8) was the Garw Green Guide, a standardised procedure for schools to set up school/communiry ELCs to collect information about what is good and bad about where they live and what should be done to improve the bad things. The Green Guide is an important milestone in the history of school/community interactions, a demonstration showing how schools can assist the community they serve in a unique programme of environmental improvements.
Agenda 21 has now been augmented with Agenda 2030 and global surveys illustrate the depth of anxiety many young people are now feeling about climate change, which in the 1990s was not on the educational horizon. Many feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults. In this contexts schools need a radical syllabus of hope for a future infused with change. Engagement of young people with the governance of their communities is more important now than it ever was.
A school/community ELC is a scaled down version of a UNESCO Biodiversity Reserve. BR's have a requirement for community action/education to learn from, and help manage, a local site of high biodiversity. In contrast, ELC's focus on individual local nature sites as management hubs where the conservation management system includes planning for restoration of wildlife, economic, development of the surrounding communities and various kinds of social events. In the Garw Valley the management hub is Bryngarw Country Park.
You can get learn more about ELC's at:
blog.culturalecology.info/2021/10/
and,
sites.google.com/view/green-garw/home
An educational milestone in this direction was Rescue Mission Planet Earth. This is a syllabus for managing human ecology for sustainable development produced by young people invited to the first 1992 Environment Summit. They carved out a young person's Agenda 21 and illustrated it with their art work and poetry. Both, Green Garw and Rescue Mission are based on the educational principle 'that what's flowing can be shared'. In particular, by combining these two initiatives young people of the Garw Valley were given an opportunity to shape their future environment in a manner that was in keeping with their own traditions and surroundings in the context of an international network of schools and their communities. Both elements are forceful examples of the importance of community heritage in an expanding culture of decarbonisation and demomstrate the application of arts reasoning to explain sustainability.
The outcome (1997-8) was the Garw Green Guide, a standardised procedure for schools to set up school/communiry ELCs to collect information about what is good and bad about where they live and what should be done to improve the bad things. The Green Guide is an important milestone in the history of school/community interactions, a demonstration showing how schools can assist the community they serve in a unique programme of environmental improvements.
Agenda 21 has now been augmented with Agenda 2030 and global surveys illustrate the depth of anxiety many young people are now feeling about climate change, which in the 1990s was not on the educational horizon. Many feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults. In this contexts schools need a radical syllabus of hope for a future infused with change. Engagement of young people with the governance of their communities is more important now than it ever was.
A school/community ELC is a scaled down version of a UNESCO Biodiversity Reserve. BR's have a requirement for community action/education to learn from, and help manage, a local site of high biodiversity. In contrast, ELC's focus on individual local nature sites as management hubs where the conservation management system includes planning for restoration of wildlife, economic, development of the surrounding communities and various kinds of social events. In the Garw Valley the management hub is Bryngarw Country Park.
You can get learn more about ELC's at:
blog.culturalecology.info/2021/10/
and,
sites.google.com/view/green-garw/home