The project “Schule des Essens” / “School of Eating” was designed and elaborated by FiBL Austria. FIBL (Forschungsinstitut für Biologischen Landbau = Research Institute of Organic Agriculture) is an independent, non-profit, research institute with offices in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and numerous projects and initiatives all over the world. FiBL’s research team works together with farmers to develop innovative and cost-effective solutions to boost agricultural productivity while never losing sight of environmental, health and socio-economic impacts. Alongside practical research, FiBL gives high priority to transferring knowledge into agricultural practice through advisory work and training. In the course of networking activities the BMBF team learned about the new concept of the school project “Schule des Essens” /“School of Eating” http://www.fibl.org/de/service/nachrichtenarchiv/meldung/article/schule-des-essens-eine-neues-projekt-von-fibl-oesterreich.html.

The pilot project was organized and conducted in a cooperation of BMBF and FiBL in a secondary school in Vienna, “NMS - Neue Mittelschule Schopenhauerstraße 79”

The concept of this project includes teacher training activities and project days with workshops and IBSE activities for students. The teacher training covered important topics as food production, organic agriculture, waste/recycling/upcycling, healthy food, “BIO-labels”- organic or not organic? etc. and was conducted by FIBl experts. BMBF contributed with the presentation of relevant (national, german language) BEST PRACTICES of environmental education provided by Austrian Associated Partners of the GreeNET project that are available on the ODS Portal

The aim of the teacher training on 16/03/2015 was to train teachers and to make them familiar with the respective “green topics”. The training was organized in work stations. Teachers were instructed to design concepts for workshops and prepare learning activities for their students. The 3 project days were run in the week after Easter (08/04 – 10/04/2015).

After the teacher training workshop in March all teachers were very motivated and prepared ambitious learning activities and workshops for the project days in April. Their preparatory work was supported by a FIBL expert (e.g. worksheets, instructions via emails, links to relevant websites) and material provided by the head of the school (e.g. print outs of BEST PRACTICES of Austrian GreeNET Associated Partners).

The three project days were very successful, teachers organized ambitious learning activities and students seemed to enjoy learning about plants, cooking and saving the environment. An important aspect was that all classes had to create proposals for follow- up activities and tasks for their colleagues (students of the other classes). So each class has to care for baby-plants, to create useful upcycling products for the school, to try out the recipes of “sustainable cooking” and to learn by playing “environmental games” within the next weeks. This is important for the sustainability of learning about environmental issues and green topics.

An additional follow-up action will be the setting up of the vegetable patches and a herbs-spiral in the schools garden. The students will have to care for and to consume the plants during the schools year. Further they have to coach the kids and teachers of the nursery school in the neighbour building to care for the garden during the summer month.

The conduction of the project in the NMS Schopenhauerstraße was some kind of “pre-pilot” of this project. FiBL plans to pilot the project in the next school year in more schools by considering the experiences made in this pre-pilot. The overall aim is to integrate the project in the whole Austrian school system.

BMBF and the GreeNET team will setup an ODS community “Schule des Essens” and upload numerous educational resources that have been designed for and used in this project. 
The Austrian newspaper “Die Presse” reported about this project, click here for more information.

DATES: 16/03/2015, 08/04/2015, 09/04/2015, 10/04/2015