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.

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.

The Partners, as expressions of local communities, detect these difficulties of people who find barriers to get in touch with new opportunities, even learning ones, even those specifically designed to their benefit as they experience, at the same time, some of the possible effects of climate changes in the intensification of some extreme weather events.
The Partners agree on the need to intervene upstream in the adult education process, identifying and exchanging those good practice for extending and developing educators' competences in the perspective of implementation of innovative motivation strategies which may encourage low-skilled or low-qualified adults, to develop and upgrade their motivation to progress towards higher qualifications, with a participatory attitude. The Partners intend to create a path where members of the staff physically meet to share existing good practices identified in respective contexts, to re-shape and calibrate them into their daily educational activities. Among the many possible approaches, the Partners are oriented towards knowledge-based experiential approaches, able to offer flexible work methodologies, for the development of more creative activities and contents, more adapted to low-skilled or low-qualified adults, who may be skeptical or discouraged.