1. La creatività. Percorsi d’invenzione 20-22 settembre 2007 Environmental Education and Creativity: a Project Proposal for Primary Education Alessandra Cavallo - Ph.D. Student Educational Studies Department Of Padua University

2. La creatività. Percorsi d’invenzione 20-22 settembre 2007 Aims I.Outline useful perspectives for an understanding of the emergency issues of the topic. II.Indicate didactic procedures guiding teaching action in class. III.Analysis of the importance of increasingly close links between school culture and environmental phenomenology. Problem Environmental education is an open-ended process allowing us to face new challenges and create novel alternatives. It is necessary to develop research, in order to observe, evaluate and analyse the ways in which citizens understand global environment issues, within the perspectives of individual contexts. Therefore, the documentation, appreciation and dissemination of knowledge and good practices developed in educational contexts acquire fundamental importance.

3. La creatività. Percorsi d’invenzione 20-22 settembre 2007 Participants 37 students (two second year calsses). All pupils were involved by employing the same ways activities. Entry situation analysis Participants were asked to draw their favourite places, so that the peculiar coordinates of the learning-teaching process were set by analytically addressing pupils’ specific interests. The drawing output of exploratory meetings was examined, providing data which were processed by means of Atlas.ti software Output1.ppt. Output1.ppt Several drawings as well as verbal explanations pointed out the children’s interest and learning curiosity regarding water-related topics. In this instance, water was viewed as a powerful metaphor of the need to be again conversant with the planet by imagining it anew. Water represented the starting point for an educational plan which could enable pupils to acquire new modes of social interaction based on critical reflection and democratic values.

4. La creatività. Percorsi d’invenzione 20-22 settembre 2007 Educational aims and teaching objectives The common objective to all activities consisted in promoting and integrating teaching concerns and practices within science education, by a process that lending relevance to the learner’s systemic interaction with reality. Such a project, in quest of knowledge modes for ecological practices, could only develop through action: building experiences around the thinking act. The aforesaid objective were pursued through two project stages: The first stage involved carrying out experiments and research concerning water, its main characteristics and the distinctive stages of its life cycle exp.ppt. exp.ppt The second stage consisted in follow-up activities Outcomes.ppt.Outcomes.ppt Project delivery

5. La creatività. Percorsi d’invenzione 20-22 settembre 2007 Conclusions The project results stress the importance of giving children opportunities to explore and discover ways of expressing their curiosity about the natural world. This attitude, and the particular need to make sense of surrounding reality, urge children to ask questions, explore research procedures and carefully observe key features of the world they live in. The focus was not on the communication and learning of facts, information and terms – science education turned into working and playing to explore matter and phenomena, finding opportunities for learning from direct experience. It was just this exchange of views, expressions, images and critical reflections concerning what was meaningful for children and why, and how to develop theories out of their experiences, which made it possible to shape an environmental education project enabling them to think over the ways they face the world.

6. Thanks for your attention