GRUNDTVIG Learning Partnerships

The Garden - A Place for Lifelong Learning

Gardens are places with a great cultural diversity and much potential; they can attract a wide spectrum of visitors to carry out environmental as well as cultural and social projects. They form an excellent basis for building intercultural and intergenerational partnerships. In the gardens and green learning sites people find environments in which they can understand themselves as part of nature or a vital system. In the age of media, gardens allow us to switch from the head to the hand, and, besides interdisciplinary know-how, to gain essential practical and cooperative experiences.
Six institutions from Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Poland and Spain formed the learning partnership. Staff and volunteers from these organizations want to address and explore issues of the environment and environmental education. The EU-countries are all facing similar challenges and the exchange of experiences is therefore of great importance to all partners.
The discussion and exchange of experiences as well as the getting to know other projects and learning locations will allow all partners to reflect critically on their own programs and projects. The shared motivation of the institutions involved is to develop programs and offerings for disseminators, teachers, NGO-staff and garden 'activists' to further open gardens as places for cultural encounters and for informal, cross-generational learning.
All partners will work together on research, preparation and final production of the main topics, the online-brochure and the short film documentary. The topics of the products will be general environmental education in gardens, soil, biodiversity and sensory perception of gardens as well as renewable energies, education for elderly and disabled people in gardens. Moreover educational methods to the topics will be worked out & presented. Learning partnership visits are conducted multilateral. Each organization will prepare a short presentation & guided tour through the educational facilities for the visiting partners & learners.
Target group is adults and young adults that are involved with the chosen topics and are working in the field of adult education; the focus lies on biodiversity, soil, climate change, renewable energy and sensory perception. The partners are encouraged to engage themselves more intensively with the key topics mentioned above. They will develop materials which allow them and the disseminators to use the learning space garden more intensively. The target is to strengthen informal and intergenerational learning.
The project lies within the framework of "education for sustainable development in gardens" which aims at enabling people to actively shape an environment which is ecologically sound, economically efficient and socially equitable, while taking into consideration global aspects.

First meeting Grundtvig (DOC, 46KB)