Session Information
Session 6, Environmental and Citizenship Education
Papers
Time:
2005-09-08
17:00-18:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Danielle Zay
Contribution
Two of the major interlinking realities of the modern societies are urbanization and environment. As the cities grow, on one side the gap between man and nature expanded and on the other side, the environmental issues became severer. Consequently, man's natural habitat has been replaced by built urban ecosystems. Ever increasing proportions of the human beings who spent almost all of their life in built environments, now turned to be urban dependant rather than nature. At this transitional stage, the need for new educational strategies and practices is of utmost importance.In order to study the nature and natural processes, taking the students to the nature became not only difficult and time-consuming but also meaningless since their direct contact and relation to nature has already been vanished. So, to focus the study of nature and natural processes into the urban ecosystems which is the closest ecosystem to all of us appears to be very effective way of study. This approach gives the priority to the processes (links, relations, interactions, interdependences, etc.) taking place within the urban ecosystems and affecting us directly. Experiences have shown clearly that the youngsters apt to learn the things with which they are interacting.This paper intend to bring the experiences gained from such training practices applied to different age (6-20) and interest (pupils, teachers, housewives) groups, into discussion. It consists of two major concepts; the discovery of urban ecosystems and using the language of nature. Discovery of urban ecosystems is carried out by the study of streets, buildings, parks, traffic, rain, temperature, wind, birds, etc by using scientific methods (surveys, measurements, hypothesis formulation and testing, comparisons, etc). The language of nature implies the way of drawing information from observations of the objects and processes.Here are some discoveries; How wind speed differs within and out side the city? How fast the mulberry tree in our schoolyard grows? Making a calendar from the flowers of our city. Here are some words from the language of nature; Can you chat with a pebble stone? The message of oak tree How will the weather like today? This approach brings the nature and natural processes into the classrooms for study and aims at using the cities as a laboratory of nature. To form a simple laboratory of nature's language is also considered as an integral part of the suggested program.
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