CERI Eye: ENSI Conference “Creating Learning Environments for the future-Sharing knowledge on Research and Practice”, Leuven, Belgium

Adriana Ortega reports back from the:

ENSI Conference “Creating Learning Environments for the future-Sharing knowledge on Research and Practice”, held in Leuven, Belgium 26-28 March 2009

Environment and School Initiatives (ENSI) is an international government based network focused on innovation and research in environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development. ENSI is currently developing an official partnership with UNESCO in the framework of the UN Decade on Education for Sustainable Development. ENSI’s work is based upon interdisciplinary learning and focusing on active learning skills. The network links national school networks throughout the world, working on quality development in educational institutions, through environmental initiatives which could be relevant for finding better practices in this educational sector.

The ENSI Conference (see conference website: www.ensi.org) was very successful and had attendance capped at 120 participants. It brought together representatives of different governments, researchers, experts, teachers and teachers educators from 24 countries, primarily across the OECD countries to promote and understand activities promoting sustainable development in schools and their communities.
The aim of the conference was to share ideas and knowledge on how to improve the quality of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), how to measure quality of ESD, what criteria should be used to measure quality of ESD and, finally, which learning environments might improve ESD, combining outcomes of the three major European projects ENSI is participating at: School Development through Environmental Eduaction (SEED), Curriculum, Sustainable development, Competences, Teacher training (CSCT) and SUPPORT.

I made a presentation of the Innovating Learning Environments project which was well-attended and engaged representatives from employers’ organisations, group training institutes and formal training programmes, practitioners and researchers as well as policy makers.