ABOUT TEACHING & LEARNING
Finally coming to the course, I think you can be quite satisfied
of the results, altough certain aspects coud perhaps have been better like food,
accomodation and computer activities.
But I disagree with the main critical point picked up by someone about the little
we got from the course to be tranferred in our job at school, instead I think
that you gave us lot of useful suggestions.
The first and the most important one is the way of teaching (and of learning
too). If teachers accept the guiding idea that environment is all aspects (nature,
artificial, politics, society, laws, culture, history, economy) present in a
territory, they get concerned that to do environmental education means to know
scientifically environmental reality. So we become aware of the importance of
a direct contact with analysed phenomena, because that’s the only way to understand
relations, to identify problems, to plan possible solutions or prevention strategies.
Environmental education needs to be proposed spending some time out of the classrooms,
studying directly the environmet, observing, touching, collecting data , making
pupils conscious of what they’re surrounded by.
This kind of active work could make easier the process of learning, as more
stimulating for students and less difficult for teaching work proposed in the
traditional way in the classrooms and in the laboratories.
This can be a general suggestion for all disciplines strictly connected with
nature sciences, but it can be as much useful for others subjects.
We spend too much time inside and almost nothing outside, we often try to put
in our’s students mind very good ideas or suggestions, but only with words and
that is not enough, even if done in a rather charismatic way.
I found a really good balance in GIS course betweeen inside and outside work
and I think almost each of us has got many good suggestions for field training.
Besides you gave us several pratical inputs for using GIS as instruments for environmental education and now it’s our task to find evenctually the way to use them in our school job according to the contents and the objectives of each discipline.
Another good result is the fact that the international meeting has permitted a constructive comparison between schoolsystems, programs, school common experiences and a friendly climate between people involved in the course.
Last, but not less important is that after this course some of us can try to work together in Comenius 3.1 projects or in other school activities, becoming a link in a wider European net of environmental education.
Birdscientist and learners listening singing birds under a wonderful old platanus
Coast field exercices
Some teaching staff
Klaus acting like a green profet, his wife Martina (a finest botanist), Sandro
from Florence University and John, a greek shaman actually working as a Remote
Sensing Professor at Eagean University.
International Chorus