Creating Nature Garden And Learning Through It Erasmus Project

Project Title

Creating Nature Garden And Learning Through It

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

This international project of three partners active in field environmental education, sustainability and nature gardens (Středisko ekologické výchovy SEVER Horní Maršov, o. p. s. from the Czech Republic, Centrum environmentálnych aktivít from Slovakia and Verein “Natur im Garten” from Austria) will provide an opportunity to increase the offer and availability of C-VET in a specific professional field – training and qualifying as “garden educator”/ “garden pedagogue”. In all of these countries, there is a lot of public gardens managed by education centres (e.g. schools, leisure time centres, family centres, museums, etc.). Gardens became an important part of many institutions and they provide huge potential for teaching and training of different target groups of their users (including students) and visitors. However, their potential is not always used properly, even though they can be a great education space right next to the door. To use this potential effectively, there is a need for trained professional educators, trainers and interpreters in a staff of institutions (which is similar to already existing qualifications of museum educators, gallery educators, zoo educators, forestry educators or nature guides). With their support, users and visitors of the garden can observe natural and ecological processes, help with planning and maintenance and get a lot of practical professional knowledge and skills. But in all of the partner countries, educators miss complex education combining garden design, maintenance and use with effective methods of education for sustainability – namely participative and hands-on educational methods. Because of this, the main objective of this project is to create and test a new training course for a garden educator. Partners will design new qualification profile of garden educator and create, pilot and evaluate appropriate training course. The course will be composed of three 3-days seminars (parts of the training course), including distance learning and support between the seminars. During these seminars, participants will get knowledge and skills in three main areas: garden design and maintenance (based on the focus of course – the concept of “nature garden”), principles and effective methods of sustainability education (with focus on participative and hands-on methods in planning, developing, maintaining and using gardens in a sustainable way), and sustainable use of gardens and promotion of garden education (ecological production from garden, promotion and use of gardens, involvement of participants). Every training activity will be in a different country based on the expertise of partners. Participant of the course will be professional educators (trainers of trainers/ adults) from partner organisations, who already have a lot of experience with leading seminars and training courses. There will be 3 participants per organisation. The training course will be created by a combination of specific know-how of each partner organisation. We will use methods such as peer-learning, active and experimental learning, case studies, excursions and lectures of external experts and distance learning. The outcome will be newly described qualification profile and methodology of a training course for garden educator published in four languages (Czech, Slovak, German and English) and 9 trained trainers. During the second part of this project, we will run dissemination activities in each country. The main dissemination activity will be training course (in the same format as it was piloted with trainers) for 20 educators from different education centres in each country for 60 participants in total. The impact will be both on partner organisations (having the course methodology and trained trainers and thus gaining the possibility to offer the training course for professional educators) and other organization involved in vocational training in this field, as well as staff of institutions with public gardens (such as schools, museums etc.) represented by participants of dissemination activities. The final beneficiaries will be users and visitors of public gardens.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 113304 Eur

Project Coordinator

Stredisko ekologicke vychovy SEVER Horni Marsov, o.p.s. & Country: CZ

Project Partners

• “Natur im Garten” GmbH
• Centrum environmentálnych aktivít