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.
The main objective of the project was to create and test the training course for garden educators. The garden educator is somebody who manage and use garden systematically for educational purposes (it can be appropriate in multiple public institutions – such as schools, family-centers, leasure-time centres, muzeums etc.). The desing of the training course was very complex and included: - concept of „nature gardens“ (introduction of the concept and its importance, desing and planning of nature garden, particular topics and elements at this type of garden) - using gardens for local production - educational methods and approaches (why and how to learn outdoors, description of the relevant methods for learning outside) - promoting concept of nature gardens and their educational use As each of partners of this project had expertise on some part of these issues, we shared our know-how, knowledge and skills to create complex training course. So other important goal of the project was to equip the teams of trainers from all three partners with new knowledge, skills and experience as an important prerequisite for our future work with the topics in adult education.
As evidenced by multiple scientific studies, people have less and less contact with nature and they spend more and more time indoors and using on-line digital tools and media. Research reports also show that it is a big problem, named as "nature deficit syndrom", causing many psychological, physical and behavioural impacts. Other important need of people (especially youngsters) is to develop competences for active citizenship. It is important not only for citizenship, but also for personal and professional life. Besides benefits for personal development, it is important for the functioning of communities and the whole society. Good opportunity for contact with nature and spending time outdoors as well as for learning important citizenship skills and competencies at the same time, are public gardens. For this purpose there can be used especially gardens of educational institutions (like schools, leasure-time centres, museums, family centres etc.) Many educational institutions have suitable outdoor plots or even gardens, but often their use for educational purposes is missing or very limited. Gardens next to the education institution can have a big potential – ecological (nature gardens increase biodiversity in towns, mitigate impacts of climate change,...), educational (learning can be done practically in contact with real world and by active experiential and collaborative educational methods) and also in terms of community functions (partnership, cooperation and team work developing interpersonal links and building social capital).