In 4 keynotes – reciprocally complementing each other - highranking scientists and experts for education delivered important findings and proposals, how to connect Forestpedagogy with participatory – concepts.

Marjaana Manninen (Counsellor of Education at the Finnish National Agency for Education)
presented the new finish national Core curriculum in which ESD has high priority. So the curricula as well encourages schools and teachers to use outdoor – learning surroundings, as to place high emphasis on pupil’s participation. It also mandates the schools to foster intensively on partnerships with the surrounding regional and local society and their interest-groups. The curricula highlights new approaches in learning like “Phenomenon based learning” or “Multidisciplinary education modules” combining different subjects with project-orientated teaching methods. This might be done in some other European states too, but the finnish way of implementing these objectives is totally different and highly participatory: The curricula isn´t given to the schools by “top-down-regulation”, it is transformed into a school-typical curricula, within an open process including all the involved partners like teachers, pupils, parents or local markets.

A living example about how these core objectives can be put into practice was impressively shown by Mikko Lumme (Principal of Hirsicampus/Log campus in Pudasjärvi). He explained Hirsicampus as “creative Learning-environment” bringing together the different given resources, like forests and timber, water, regional food and healthy nutrition or typical sports-disciplines. This holistic approach of combining different dimensions of sustainable development leads to developing Hirsicampus´ own school-philosophy, focusing especially on the cooperation of the different age-groups of pupils, taking care for each other.

Finally Nina Tokola (Postdoctoral Professor, University of Eastern Finland; “All youth project”) completed the keynotes showing the design of a new research-project for developing solutions for youth participation and sustainable wellbeing. For that the researchers are communicating with teenagers and young adults from the age of 16 to 29 about their visions about future forests, their own role and activity within their environments of the future and about their key ideas for sustainable growth, bioeconomy and environmental citizenship. They are also discussing and analyzing their later employment wishes, focusing intensively on the principle, that “it´s mainly not about future professions, but much more about skills and competences”.

The Congress was enriched with a huge variety of 15 different workshops (90 minutes) and about 15 market of possibilitiy-offers (30 minutes), showing best-practice-examples of forestpedagogy-activities.

At the end of the 13th European Forestpedagogy-Congress the participants and the hosting organizations summarized their conclusions as following:

• Forestpedagogs are challenged to increase their activities with participatory offers and projects, creating real-life-situations.
• There is an urgent need to develop more Forest Pedagogy offers for teenagers and young – adults, as they are the “change-agents” in a world, wanting to achieve the SDG´s of the UN-agenda 2030.
• Core objectives and core competences of ESD have not yet reached the teachers as well as a lot of forestpedagogues! So the cooperation between schools/teachers and forestpedagogues/forests needs new inputs and conceptual impulses.
• The 14th European Forest Pegagogics Congress in Riga (1st – 4th july 2019) will focus on this tasks.

13th European Forest Pedagogics Congress links:

• Congress website
• The presentations of the Congress
• Keyotes speakers
• Congress Photos