Collaboration Européenne pour la co-construction d'une formation en éducation à la nature et à la citoyenneté

Taking into account challenges of nature education and identified needs of stakeholders, the project is structured around three main objectives: - Supporting professionalization of nature educatio...

Taking into account challenges of nature education and identified needs of stakeholders, the project is structured around three main objectives: - Supporting professionalization of nature education stakeholders in Europe by strengthening their skills and providing them with educational resources to enable them to better respond to the emerging challenges they face in the field; - To promote exchange of practices and pedagogical innovation by using participatory methods and co-constructing with them a training course that can be adapted to different contexts and countries, with an emphasis on experiences lived in and with nature; - To contribute to creation of a European network of nature educators to disseminate and sustain the results of the project. The intercultural co-construction of the program has resulted in a tool that is adapted to the environmental, institutional, and socio-economic contexts of the partner countries. This co-construction process has given the volunteers a real ability to take ownership of the subject, to disseminate the results themselves, and to forge strong links between them with a desire to continue collaborating.

Based on a preliminary inventory of stakeholders and nature education training carried out prior to the project, we identified needs of the professional field in relation to current societal issues: “how to adopt a complex approach to nature education.” After establishing some guidelines for this approach (the fundamental elements), we issued a call for expressions of interest within our countries in order to form a group of 24 volunteers, and prepared the first seminar to bring them together. There, we co-developed the beginnings of training courses on the complex approach to NEE based on several themes, which were tested in whole or in part by the volunteers in their respective countries. Resources (bibliography, slideshows, etc.) and activities were inventoried, created, and made available in the form of fact sheets based on the volunteers' knowledge. During the second seminar, analysis of feedback from the experiments enabled us to formalize a generic training course (website), independent of the themes covered, and to consider the future of the European network thus formed. This course was disseminated in the three partner countries as well as in Spain and Italy.

We held two seminars to jointly develop the ENE training course, which brought together 24 volunteer educators from the three partner countries, who were actively involved in the creation process and followed the principle of peer training. Upon returning to their countries, the participants organized training sessions, experimenting with components of the course they had created together. The results of experiments, the final training course, and an inventory of ENE resources were integrated into two websites (in French and Greek), available for free access. During the seminars, the richness of exchanges, the diversity of the participants' professions, and the interculturality fostered emergence of a European ENE network with ongoing and future collaborations. The project has clarified the complex approach to ENE, which is an original and complementary gateway to existing ENE approaches. The dissemination day during the Stakeholders National Meetings of ENE in France brought together 66 French participants, including Mayotte, and volunteers from the three countries. It provided an opportunity to communicate the project and the value of a complex approach to mobilizing society on socio-ecological issues.