Our analysis led us to identify four medium term strategic goals aimed at increasing our capacity to provide nationwide and international education that supports the transition to a sustainable future: 1) Upskill our staff with new tools and pedagogical methods that are participatory, engaging, learner centred, motivating and transformative. 2) Acquire educational approaches that enable us to reach learners we are currently failing to reach. 3) Acquire methods for a) effective context analysis and b) strategizing. This, to improve the relevance of educational interventions by engaging new competencies and learning frameworks. 4) Establish working relationships with leading education organisations in Europe in order to learn from them and create opportunities for international cooperation.
Our core mission is to use insights and expertise from the field of environmental psychology to empower and equip citizens and civil society to contribute to necessary social transformation. Reviewing our work however showed the following needs: (i) our education work is grounded in rigorous research and many staff leading in adult education have a background as academics and researchers. While they are excellent educators, we needed to learn teaching methods which are less didactic, and more participatory and engaging for diverse learners. (ii) we became aware of innovations in the field of Eco- Psychological Education, especially methods such as ‘Nature Connection Education’ and Eco-learning. We saw that these methods have enormous potential to integrate with our existing expertise to produce innovative curricula. (iii) the growing urgency with climate change demands ambitious strategies for a transition to sustainability. To be impactful, not just on individual learners, but also on communities and the wider public sphere; this required us to deepen our ability to analyze the situation, to really understand the needs of learners and civil society, as well as opportunities for impactful educational interventions.