Today the participants were in the mood to celebrate Halloween and did so in style with over half of the group dressing up in costumes related to Climate Change. This certainly took the rest by surprise (not to mention the German language teacher) as they walked in through the door in their costumes which were impressively put together. The weekly review was then carried out by Tatum, Supriya and Thami who placed four aspects from last weeks sessions and field trips on a pin-board. The group then had to write the first thing that came to their minds when they thought of these aspects and these were discussed a long with what had been achieved last week.  They finished off this summary with the five fingered approach to ESD which for certain reasons it is best not to mention.

Participants celebrating halloween

The introduction for this weeks training was read out by Anne Mette where she introduced the topic  of ‘Development of curricula for ESD‘. Hannes Siege  from GIZ joined the group once again, this time as the chair of today’s lessons and the topic discussed was that of competencies for ESD. Hannes gave lectures to the group firstly on the competence approach.  Within this lecture he discussed firstly the definition of a competency before moving on to the use of PISA (Programmes of International Student Assessment) to analyze the strength of an education system in the OECD countries.

The group also welcomed Ms. Ultze from Berlin Senete Administration to the training who was to give an experience report based on a variety of different programmes involving Global learning and School curricula and in effect showing the global activity of ESD.

Hannes will return tomorrow in order to continue on with the topic of competencies and to teach the participants on different tools and methods. The group will also visit the social Science research Center in Berlin to witness first hand the social dimension of ESD.