We follow the idea that the ecological crisis was preceded by a cultural crisis. ESD is not a teaching subject, but should find interdisciplinary space in every subject. We want to show to what extent all 17 Sustainable Development Goals affect the reality of our lives. And we want to provide teachers with learning materials that make it easy to connect each subject and the corresponding content to the 17 goals. We are developing these materials in a pilot region and showing how the ars vivendi content can be transferred to other regions. The ars vivendi didactics are an ideal content to start further Erasmus+ school encounters with. We want to address the creative, emotional intelligence of our target group and connect it with practical, research-first scientific methods. We want to develop an internally differentiated, inclusively applicable and cross-cultural didactics. The aim is to make sustainability innovative, creative and practical to learn and teach and to show that sustainability has already been thought about and implemented in some existing traditions.
We have 16 years of experience in developing educational programs for schools and youth. Schools and other facilities and institutions (like Museums, Botanical Gardens and other cultural institutions) that offer educational opportunities for young people are faced with the task of incorporating and implementing all aspects of sustainability and the 17 SDGs in their context. This requires new, innovative learning materials that can be easily incorporated into teaching tasks and educational offerings. Our challenge, the aim of the project was, to develop an exemplary, innovative didactic that makes the 17 goals/SDGs teachable and learnable. In order to ensure practical relevance, we have put together a partnership with schools, independent youth work organizations, environmental education, research, environmental policy, pedagogy and natural sciences. As alpine regions in Europe are faced most sightable with climate changes, we were using one of them in the German-Italian context for pilot region in order to present as well the global as the local level of our project. In addition to innovation and new approaches, we always want to make the cultural heritage of sustainable action visible, teachable and learnable.