The green side of Grundtvig

With Spring in the air, our latest edition of edUKation explores some of the many green projects supported by the Grundtvig programme over the last seven years.

Dr Nick Owen MBE, Director of the Aspire Trust, who runs the Forests for All, All for Forests project, gives us an insight into how the project connects adult learners from  seven partner countries in the teaching of the environment, culture and volunteering, all with a focus on the local forests. Nick explains:

European forests have become for us and the wider partnership, a source of questions, surprises, and many powerful learning moments. Veteran forests, exterminating agents and the effect of coppicing have been a phenomena we have learnt about which act as a constant reminder of the power that forests have over our minds, bodies and psyches.

From the project’s recent partner meeting in Vilnius in Lithuania, the participants were inspired to produce a range of artistic products reflecting their visit including the following poem:

Artist Knowledge: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Knowledge of the first kind is the stats,

the dates, the measurements.

The what, the when, the where.

Knowledge of the second kind

is the interpretations,

the rational analysis of observable events.

The scientific, analytic, predictive.

The regulatory, the politic.

The how, the whether.

Artists knowledge is knowledge of the third kind.

Sensory and sensitive,

Intuitive and imaginative,

Magical and miraculous.

Generating meaning and stories

which bestow ownership of knowledge of the first kind

and give purpose to the knowledge of the second kind.

The what-if? The why? The If-not, then why-not?

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