Transformative Learning through the Prism of Environmental Sustainability

The project aims to the exchange of good practices in the field of adult education, as regards the transformative learning activated through the scientific and cultural matrix connected to decades-long investigation, mitigation and adaptation initiatives to climate change and environmental sustainability, while learning how to re-shape, adapt and replicate them to other target groups and contexts. In March 2018, the World Bank presented a study in Brussels showing that technological and digital advancements increase the gap between low-skilled and better-trained persons, between innovative social-economical districts and marginalized ones.

We can spot at local scale areas with rarefied economies, fewer opportunities and less capacity for resilience. Without an original effort for inclusion, the intrinsic social and economic drivers to the development of people and communities are weak and the divide can hardly be overcome. Especially in the contexts with less positive socio-economical dynamics, people maybe less and less inclined to a lifelong learning perspective, needed to surf the mounting wave of globalization and ripe its benefits. Ageing dynamics all over Europe may worsen this situation. Education for Sustainable Development can play a very effective role in the processes of recovery and resilience in aging individuals and communities in the face of current challenges, helping mitigate the impacts of increasing divides, counterbalancing the depression in the spirit of initiative, entrepreneurial mindset, the push towards personal and professional evolution.

This project has to be carried out transnationally for the following main reasons:

• • it deals with a European challenge: how to bridge the gap of the socio-economic and cultural divides, through adult education;
  • by sharing their good national practices the partnership can develop methodologies and tools of higher quality and efficacy than working only at national level;
  • transnationality allows dissemination and exploitation of good results at a larger, European scale, as such the impact of the project will be bigger and effective to projects at national scale and may be inspiration for other organizations that can replicate it;
  • the issues of sustainable development and protection of cultural heritage and their relevance to education are intrinsically relevant transnationally.

Duration of the project: 24 months (1st September, 2019 – 31st August, 2021)