About project

Civic engagement towards sustainability often stems from a personal experience of being affected or moved by the effects of the ecological crisis, rather than from information alone. However, current education, especially in universities, is considerably biased towards theoretical information rather than promoting knowledge and experience that will forge ecological citizens.

The project’s starting point is hence in the deep ecology of Arne Nass which intertwines civic engagement with philosophical reflection, knowledge with experience. The partners’ aim to develop education at the involved institutions towards synergy of these dimensions and to strengthen the weaker or omitted ones. The Department of Environmental Studies at MU, the Department of Development and Environmental Studies at UP, both respected institutions in the fields of sustainable development and environmental studies, in cooperation with the Centre for Environmental Activities Sluňákov, established partnership with the Department of Sports, Physical Education and Outdoor Studies na University of South-East Norway, to bring together approaches established in their respective countries and institutionalize a fruitful dialogue. Besides deep ecology, the project will thus draw from the Norwegian friluftsliv philosophy, Czech tradition of outdoor experiential education and philosophy of nature and corporeality, but also from the fields of arts and environmental aesthetics.

Involved teachers are sharing their knowledge and experience during peer-learning workshops, study and train innovative approaches, with focus on direct embodied methods of approaching nature, and cooperate to utilize them in university education. Main output will be an innovative education programme consisting of relatively independent modules that the partners will combine according to their needs to create a new course at Czech universities, an innovated course at the USN, and a new experiential tour at Sluňákov. The program will cultivate the students’ and participants’ perceptiveness to the nonhuman surroundings, direct knowledge of nature, personal relation to it and deep reflection of it. It will deepen theoretical knowledge and root it in personal experience. In the long-term, this might strongly influence their sense of personal involvement in both the local and global environmental issues and through that lead to civic engagement anchored in personal motivation and deep understanding. The project will also lay foundations of long-term collaboration and further proliferation of the developed approaches.