We were very pleased with how our conference programme worked out in Nicosia this year. We had around 70 presentations (including posters) with a good number of those coming from presenters who had not previously been involved. All sessions were well attended in a venue that effectively supported good conversations and participation.
We began our conference with an opening workshop focused on policy and its role in Environmental Education. This was a hybrid event, so it enabled participation from members who were not able to attend in person due to the conference location. We intend to maintain this into the future because we find that it provides an important moment for all of the presenters and participants at the conference to come together before the programme begins, and consolidates our commitment to providing a supportive and participatory community for our researchers who are working on topics that can be very challenging, emotionally and in other ways. For the workshop we set up a youtube channel with some videos interviewing key members of the community and this will be added to this year, and into the future.
Cyprus has a very active environmental and sustainability education practice and so we were also lucky to be able to leave the conference venue for one afternoon to run 2 or our sessions in a local environmental education centre. This added a valuable sense of place to our work, enabling us to connect with the practice of ESE in Cyprus itself. This was very well received by our participants, and provided much positive feedback.
We had some very successful joint sessions with Network 8, Network 34 and Network 20 which may lead to a special issue.
Our membership continues to grow. We now have 500 members on our mailing list which is set out every 6 weeks to share news across the field.
We have 3 new co-convenors this year, and we are going to be looking to increase our number of convenors to support the rise in membership. We will also be restarting our network advisory group so that we can make the most of the experience of past convenors when they reach the end of their terms.