Post by Admin on Aug 10, 2021 8:24:35 GMT
Global climate change has already had big observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have shrunk, ice on rivers and lakes is breaking up earlier, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. This is happening against the backdrop of a loss of polar sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves. These changes are accelerating. Experts say that today's conditions (2021) are actually what their computer models predicted we would not see until 2090. Yet, we continue to promote a non adaptive education system designed over a century ago for living within a benign, diverse and resource-rich, stable environment.
The need for a robust and vibrant culture of seed diversity was one of the motivations that led Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers to establish the Flatbread Society – a collective of farmers, artists, activists, scientists and other people involved in urban food production and preservation of the people’s commons. Since 2012, the group has been working on a permanent art installation which defines a “common” area on the waterfront development of Bjørvika in Oslo, Norway.
The term Installation art categorises innovative works that generate questions rather than being the outcome of crafting aesthetically pleasing objects. The Oslo installation consists of an urban farm, an allotment community, an ancient grain field and a bakehouse for making flatbread. The message is that flatbread can function as a social artefact: an ‘international currency’ to bring diverse cultures, defined by the food they eat, together for the common purpose of creating a culture of conservation.
we-make-money-not-art.com/the-seed-journey-to-preserve-plant-genetic-diversity/
In 2016, Amy Franceschini was shortlisted in the Artes Mundi competition at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. She travelled to Cardiff from Oslo by boat, retracing the migratory journey of seeds, to explore the politics of food production and the countries that our foods originate from. Her legacy was the idea that an installation can apply arts reasoning to explain sustainability. In Wales it led to the formation of the S.K.O.M.E.R project, linking art with science to demonstrate sustainability knowledge can organised to manage environments responsibly.
Inspired by Futurefarmers and the Flatbread Society an online collective is now being developed by International Classrooms On Line as a free forum entitled ‘Educating for Change’. The aim is to follow the history of breeding and processing cereal crops that enabled the migration of Neolithic farmers from Scandinavia down the West coast of Britain, and now on to the future carbon zero culture of humankind.
Skomer is actually the name of a small offshore island marking the southernmost Welsh staging post of this migration. The island and its prolific biodiversity was an educational blueprint for the pedagogy of evolutionary humanism, an idea which emerged from Julian Huxley’s experience of Skomer’s wildlife inhabiting the deserted fields of its late Bronze Age farmers. Huxley, as UNESCO’s first director, carried these ideas of evolutionary humanism into the new organisation. They became the basis of its Man and the Biosphere programme launched in 1971, that aims to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments, a pedagogy currently at the centre of debate about the kind of holistic education necessary to adapt to global warming.
The objective of Education for Change is to infiltrate subject silos of Western education at all levels with the cross-curricular, extramural, knowledge structure of cultural ecology. In this context, joining the forum symbolises the first step in organising a personal body of knowledge for lifelong learning to meet targets of the 2030 sustainable development agenda.
Educating for change is necessary to equilibrate human demands with Earth’s limited capacity for regeneration. The message is that nature is a partner in food production, not an obstacle. Also, everyone is a farmer, preserving and cultivating the ‘seeds of knowledge’ for a future society that has to live sustainably. It is extremely unlikely that top-down teacher/pupil institutional instruction of the West will give way to bottom up individualised life long learning. However, education leaders want students to have more autonomy, from what they learn, to how the classroom operates. With increasing recognition of the importance of transitioning students from school to an ever-changing outside world, it is argued that ‘student agency' must be the norm, not the exception.
New Culture: New Education
The need for a robust and vibrant culture of seed diversity was one of the motivations that led Amy Franceschini and Futurefarmers to establish the Flatbread Society – a collective of farmers, artists, activists, scientists and other people involved in urban food production and preservation of the people’s commons. Since 2012, the group has been working on a permanent art installation which defines a “common” area on the waterfront development of Bjørvika in Oslo, Norway.
The term Installation art categorises innovative works that generate questions rather than being the outcome of crafting aesthetically pleasing objects. The Oslo installation consists of an urban farm, an allotment community, an ancient grain field and a bakehouse for making flatbread. The message is that flatbread can function as a social artefact: an ‘international currency’ to bring diverse cultures, defined by the food they eat, together for the common purpose of creating a culture of conservation.
we-make-money-not-art.com/the-seed-journey-to-preserve-plant-genetic-diversity/
In 2016, Amy Franceschini was shortlisted in the Artes Mundi competition at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales. She travelled to Cardiff from Oslo by boat, retracing the migratory journey of seeds, to explore the politics of food production and the countries that our foods originate from. Her legacy was the idea that an installation can apply arts reasoning to explain sustainability. In Wales it led to the formation of the S.K.O.M.E.R project, linking art with science to demonstrate sustainability knowledge can organised to manage environments responsibly.
Inspired by Futurefarmers and the Flatbread Society an online collective is now being developed by International Classrooms On Line as a free forum entitled ‘Educating for Change’. The aim is to follow the history of breeding and processing cereal crops that enabled the migration of Neolithic farmers from Scandinavia down the West coast of Britain, and now on to the future carbon zero culture of humankind.
Skomer is actually the name of a small offshore island marking the southernmost Welsh staging post of this migration. The island and its prolific biodiversity was an educational blueprint for the pedagogy of evolutionary humanism, an idea which emerged from Julian Huxley’s experience of Skomer’s wildlife inhabiting the deserted fields of its late Bronze Age farmers. Huxley, as UNESCO’s first director, carried these ideas of evolutionary humanism into the new organisation. They became the basis of its Man and the Biosphere programme launched in 1971, that aims to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments, a pedagogy currently at the centre of debate about the kind of holistic education necessary to adapt to global warming.
The objective of Education for Change is to infiltrate subject silos of Western education at all levels with the cross-curricular, extramural, knowledge structure of cultural ecology. In this context, joining the forum symbolises the first step in organising a personal body of knowledge for lifelong learning to meet targets of the 2030 sustainable development agenda.
Educating for change is necessary to equilibrate human demands with Earth’s limited capacity for regeneration. The message is that nature is a partner in food production, not an obstacle. Also, everyone is a farmer, preserving and cultivating the ‘seeds of knowledge’ for a future society that has to live sustainably. It is extremely unlikely that top-down teacher/pupil institutional instruction of the West will give way to bottom up individualised life long learning. However, education leaders want students to have more autonomy, from what they learn, to how the classroom operates. With increasing recognition of the importance of transitioning students from school to an ever-changing outside world, it is argued that ‘student agency' must be the norm, not the exception.
New Culture: New Education