Education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the great challenges today. The goal of ESD is to open up educational opportunities to all people, which will enable them to acquire knowledge and values, behaviours and lifestyles that are necessary for a future worth living. The Friday for future movement shows the strong desire of young people all over the world to realize these goals in taking actions against climate change to be able to "live in harmony in nature", a demand in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. School gardens (SGs) as authentic learning environments are promising settings to develop stainable relevant competences. Garden-based learning activities provide students with necessary basic knowledge to understand ecological coherences which are the key to further understanding. Especially in urban areas, SGs can be biodiversity hotspots and refuges for plants and animals. Students gain insight into life cycles and get aware of the importance of seasonality and regionality by growing organic food for healthy nutrition. SGs make a valuable contribution to the development of social skills and enable the integration of people of different cultures, and with the positive effects on problematic behaviour preventing early school leaving. That makes SGs to ideal places for experiencing education for sustainable development. Acting locally students gain basic ideas for global thinking. A SG as a miniature edition of a piece of the world can provide real-life conditions to take ecological, economic and social decisions. But these benefits are not yet visible for all educators - they are not aware of the potential lying in this learning environment and often lack school gardening expertise as it was not necessarily part of their academic courses or vocational training. In the school curricula, the implementation of ESD as a key perspective is wildly spread all over Europe but a lot of educators need support by implementing these goals into their daily routine. Many individual SG initiatives have been established in different European countries, with a multitude of concepts and didactic approaches. Likewise, school gardening in each country is based on its specific cultural traditions. In Europe SGs have a long tradition - the Czech priest Johann Amos Comenius mentioned 1657 in the Didactica Magna, the first didactic book for teachers, already the value of SGs for children's education. Nowadays, SGs are often used to learn cultural techniques in growing vegetables and fruits. After the agriculture’s green revolution and 1989, many school gardens in Eastern Europe were given up and used e.g. for sports activities. The challenges of ESD gave SGs a new chance: Many primary schools restarted school gardening with a focus on nature experience and science learning, with growing popularity. Planting seeds and watch them grow to vegetables is vital for the understanding of organic food and can influence children intake of it. These nature experiences are to prevent nature alienation. In secondary schools, gardens are mainly used for ecological and scientific learning in projects. The immense amount of knowledge and valuable information on school gardening techniques and didactic methods having accumulated across Europe is not visible for the community and, therefore, not available for teaching efforts. Fostering SGs activities in Europe by giving them an international platform is a potential way to reach teachers and early childhood educators as well as students and other gardening people. Being inspired by the activities of others they can pass on the knowledge about the importance of fresh and healthy food, regionally and seasonally grown, as well as the value of intact ecosystems and biological diversity to children and students. These topics are very important to change people’s habits towards more sustainability and, thus, are a prerequisite to improve their lives and to build greener and healthier societies. In this project, sustainable-relevant skills and competences for garden-based learning will be defined. The participants will develop a curriculum for the teachers training and ICT materials to share on the Erasmus+ online platform. There will be an exchange of experiences and a sharing of best practice with the focus on teachers and students as future educators. During a summer school with parts of blended learning, teachers can increase sustainable-relevant skills and competences in using SGs as learning environments. The project will unite existing national networks to a European one and so make ideas and benefits available for everyone. The translation of materials in different European languages will increase the reachability and lower language barriers. The direct contact and exchange on SG topics should decrease anti-Eastern and anti-Western prejudices. Global challenges can only be solved by international collaborations. This network might be the starting point.
The project’s main aim was to connect people using school gardens as learning environments for ESD and thus gather in garden-based teaching and training engaged persons from different European countries in order to promote the exchange of ideas, concepts, and teaching materials. Another aim was to develop a school garden curriculum for teacher training institutions and compile new concepts and materials to disseminate via the network and the newly created webpage. By doing so, the project intended to foster garden-based teaching and learning activities in different European countries, in order to make the benefits of garden-based learning more available for European children. The exchange between eastern and western experts on the same topic should reduce prejudices from both sides and promote an Eastern-Western Partnership.
School gardens as authentic learning environments offer immense possibilities to develop sustainable relevant skills that are needed to change people’s habits towards more sustainability. They are a prerequisite to improve their lives and to build greener and healthier societies. The main motive to develop and apply for this project, therefore, was to promote school gardening activities throughout Europe. Many school gardens are established, revealing a multitude of concepts, didactic approaches, and cultural traditions. The immense amount of existing knowledge and information on gardening techniques and didactic methods are existing but not visible for the community and, therefore, were not available for teaching and learning efforts. The project addressed the need for connecting institutions, non-governmental organizations, school garden teachers and -trainers in an European school garden network and to make the network visible through a website. To see the activities and best-practice school gardens of others and to get into contact with garden pedagogues from other countries can be very inspiring and can pass on the knowledge about healthy food, regionality and seasonality, the value of intact ecosystems, and biodiversity.