Making friends with nature

This is a brief description of the Comenius 1 environmental education projects proposed at the TEPEE meeting.

(a) Garden: The project aims to increase the positive attitudes of respect and solidarity towards different aspects of life. Primarily making use of the expressive arts, students will be encouraged to develop a sense of belonging towards their environment and a conscious and shared notion of citizenship. The ultimate goal is that of ensuring environmental concern by fostering stewardship.

(b) Safe Water - Sweet Life: Around the world, safe drinking water is seriously threatened. This project sets out to explore and study the importance of water to all living organisms. It will adopt a multidisciplinary, cross-curricular approach in which a number of aspects of water production, quality, conservation and usage are examined. The results of the study will be shared among the partners and other schools by means of a website.

(c) Preservation of Parks: The project aims at helping students explore the interaction between humans and their environment through parks. Parks are viewed as an opportunity for cross-curricular work targeted at the discovery of flora and fauna resources in the different partner countries and the analysis and evaluation of the biodiversity of natural resources as well as of the cultural heritage of the park.

(d) Friends of Nature: The project will promote cooperation and collaboration between students from different European countries over environmental problems - friends of nature without frontiers. It will attempt to create a culture of participation and conservation of natural heritage by developing an attitude of respect and responsibility towards natural resources.

(e) STONHE (Safeguarded Territory On Natural Historical Environment): By looking from a variety of perspectives (scientific, historical, archaeological, literary, etc.), the project will try to revalue and safeguard the natural and historical heritage of the partner countries. The project will develop environmental education packages aimed at helping students develop appropriate cognitive, psychomotor and affective skills.

(f) IDEAL (InterDisciplinary Environment Approach and Learning): This subject-related environmental education project presents students with tasks aimed at helping a fictitious family with a teenage daughter/son solve a number of problems related to the family's environmental behaviour. The issues explored may relate to misuse of energy resources, the way they can reduce their water consumption, how they can recycle a number of daily goods and how they can dispose of the waste they produce in an environmentally friendly way.

(g) Say it with Flowers - an environmental dialogue between rare European flora: Initially the project will analyse the historical-political background of the vanishing plants of the different partner countries as well as their scientific importance. Once children appreciate the importance of the rare species, they are encouraged to express their feelings through a variety of expressive arts with the rest of the community.

Schools which need more information or are interested in participating in one of these projects are kindly requested to contact Dr Paul Pace on paul.j.pace@um.edu.mt. Further details about the TEPEE network are available from the website: www.tepee-network.net