Workshop Partner

Background

With the recognition that Education is an important part of sustainable development strategies, Educators become a key professional group in facilitating Sustainable Development (SD). Given the nature of SD, professionals involved in educating and communicating for SD processes need to:

• Have a multidisciplinary perspective and understanding of SD;
• Build a unique set of skills—problem solving, conflict resolution, consensus building, creative thinking, analytical abilities, information management, interpersonal skills, is another goal; bringing together stakeholders, facilitating participation, reflection, visioning, dialogue, planning, etc.
• Facilitate SD processes—ensuring people’s access to relevant information, enabling people participate in decision making process, build people’s abilities to helping people develop a collective vision for the future and initiate dialogues and processes that would help to realize that vision.

While the above mentioned aspects are an integral part of an educator’s role, very often the people who enter into the field of ESD, are not necessarily trained in these and have to pick these up on-the-job, by trial and error, since there are few formal courses which can help them to learn these. Hence the need for structured training for ESD.

Scope
The workshop discussed training programmes in ESD for professionals who have made/wish to make a career in the field of ESD, or whose work involves ESD as an integral part. Such training programmes need to provide an opportunity for persons who have entered the profession of ESD to become trained and capacity-built environmental educators by acquiring, in a relatively short time, the multidisciplinary perspective that is necessary for environmental educators.

The workshop, on the whole, focused on current status and availability of training opportunities for educators and communicators, both within formal and non-formal situations; what and how of institutionalizing such capacity building efforts; what kind of resource mobilization is required; how networking and on-going support for capacity building can be strengthened; based on the experiences, what are some of the effective ways of training—short duration with special focus, long-duration and more intensive, distance mode, mentoring, etc. In the context of ESD and DESD, the workshop specifically tried to address the following concerns:

1. Comment on what are the essential knowledge, skills, abilities, competencies that an educator or SD needs
2. Set of criteria, features, factors that will define a good ESD training programme—training models, structure and content of the programme; the delivery mechanisms; focus on the kinds/categories of skills built, etc.
3. How can existing training programmes be re-oriented so as to help trainees establish the link with as well as build their capacities in working towards goals of the DESD as well as other associated plans—MDGs, EFA, etc.
4. Given that different professional groups will have different ESD related training needs, how can training efforts meet the needs of different professional groups—policy planners, media professionals, NGO/CBO professionals, staff of Wildlife/Forest departments, teachers, other educator groups, government officials, etc.
5. Based on the existing experiences, derive learnings and identify constraints so as to be able to help in improving efforts in training professionals in ESD—training models, content of such programmes; scope-local/regional/international/vocation or profession-wise; duration of such programmes; training techniques and methodologies used; addressing the key concern of ‘transfer of learning’; post-training support;
6. Identify the immediate needs in terms of developing good training material
7. Suggest innovative/relevant ways and mechanisms of effectively evaluating training programmes.
8. For the decade, project the ESD training needs and suggest mechanisms of meeting these needs—institutionalizing the efforts, mobilizing resources, networking and experience sharing; mechanisms for providing effective on-the-job training including the potential of ICT and distance education in particular;
9. Efforts required for institutionalizing training—resources, efforts in establishing the training centres, mechanisms to enable training centre to update them.