Small-scale Partnership in Adult Education
CONTEXT
The gastronomic habits, from the purchase of products to their preparation, from large-scale industrial production to individual and family habits, are at the heart of many European strategies on which the European Green Deal is based: the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Organic Action Plan, the Biodiversity Strategy. In summary, much still needs to be done to promote proper food management in citizens: in fact, it is an inefficient activity and families are the main ones responsible for food waste, with levels of waste today very far from the goal recommended by the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development.
Education towards sustainability is an important process that involves fostering a deeper understanding of interconnections between the environment, the economy and society, but also the need to develop conscious behaviour to help ensure a sustainable future for everybody. Non-formal education courses on sustainability environment can provide practical experiences, reflections on concrete actions, collaboration and sharing of experiences, actively promoting change on an individual and collective level, as well as acting as a tool for cultural empowerment.
OBJECTIVES
A FISHER’S LIFE FOR INCLUSION aims to promote environmental education among groups of senior women living in Mediterranean coastal areas, unemployed and with low literacy levels. These will be involved in outdoor activities, fishing, and gastronomic storytelling, focused on exploring the interconnections between individual action and environmental effect and on the connection between information and practical solutions, adaptable to our daily habits.
The project aims to achieve three objectives:
1. Educational and awareness-raising objective: through 12 workshops focusing on environmental education and the negative impacts of human activities on the environment, the sea and the Mediterranean coastline. From pollution and loss of biodiversity to climate change, waste management and food waste.
2. Knowledge enhancement objective for senior groups: the target groups will be able to understand the complementarity and the possibility of exploiting the ‘sea resource’, i.e. to find a dimension where they can connect their cultural roots to a future made of innovation and sustainability.
3. Development of senior civic participation: the direct involvement of participants will help to create not only awareness of the importance of safeguarding the sea and fishery resources and how the sea and its ecosystem are fundamental for the planet, but they will also be able to connect land and sea and value knowledge, from traditional to everyday knowledge such as food, with practical actions of sustainable and conscious civic participation.
ACTIVITIES
ACTIVITY 1. Management, communication, and dissemination.
This activity elaborates and implements all the planning, management and monitoring actions, also including those communication activities necessary to achieve good visibility and disseminate results at various possible platforms, from local and national to European ones such as EPALE or Project Results, etc. This activity also strengthens, for example, from the point of view of logistics, the workshops and events of activities 2 and 3.
The project carries out two cycles of experiential activities, one in contact with sport fishing and focused on the memory of women in Mediterranean fishing, the other oriented to the promotion of daily sustainability skills, gastronomy, consumption and waste, working with islanders and communities which live on the Mediterranean coasts. A transversal, outdoor educational model will therefore be implemented, designed on the effective needs of the target groups.
ACTIVITY 2. Narratives and experiential workshops: women’s fishing and seafaring.
The activity aims to involve senior citizens and, in particular, a female audience of women over 55 resident in the coastal and island territories of intervention in a path of environmental education that, starting from the evocation of the culture of seafaring and local fishing (south-western Sicilian and eastern Cypriot coasts), can transmit knowledge and awareness of the most significant environmental and Mediterranean sea problems: overfishing, loss of biodiversity pollution, rising water temperatures.
The content of the activity will be expressed with two main tools: amateur fishing, which has long been considered an important form of outdoor education, which acts actively on the well-being of the participants like “forest bathing” or other naturalistic activities ed excursions, and storytelling, a powerful tool to raise awareness of the environment and promote sustainability skills.
Two contents will therefore be developed together, in both cases directly connected to project activity: on the one hand, the memory of women in fishing activities will be recovered, a productive
world, of active female participation which, starting from the 1950s and 1960s, began to disappear in all the island and Mediterranean coastal towns. On the other hand, the narratives will tend to the future and will transmit basic skills on the protection of the sea, involving civic groups that are most distant from contemporary forms of awareness for environmental sustainability, due to obvious gaps including age and widespread ageism, low level of literacy, lack of basic and sectoral competences.
The tasks include:
– the elaboration of a didactic handout on the history of women in fishing and in the Mediterranean, insights on fishing as an educational activity and for the psychophysical well-being of senior participants;
– involvement and coordination of the participants (10 – 15), provision of an educational path in coastal areas, for a total of 4 meetings;
– participation in two online meetings with the project’s coordinator.
ACTIVITY 3. Consumption, waste, cooking: environmental education for senior citizens.
A group of 30 participants from Treenacria and SEAL Cyprus will participate in this activity. Once again, this activity involves the senior targets in an educational process aimed at familiarising them with the culture of sustainable consumption, the fight against food waste, and the design of sustainable narrative menus that can integrate the eating habits of senior citizens and their families.
The tasks include:
– intellectual supervision for the elaboration of the second didactic handout on consumption and waste, and production of the narrative, sustainable menus for senior citizens and local households;
– involvement and coordination of the participants;
– implementation of two informative and narrative meetings on habits for a total of 6 hours;
– validation of results and thematic mentorship.
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RESULTS
The main expected result is an educational path towards environmental protection and sustainable habits, addressing important topics such as the Mediterranean female memory in fish farming, delivering more than 60 hours of outdoor and participatory training experience in Sicily and Cyprus. The experiential path will be accompanied by handouts and other training resources, including digital ones, by the publication of sustainable gastronomic menus and finally by a dissemination event in Italy.
PARTICIPANTS
The general target group comprises senior citizens, mainly women, with low levels of schooling and typically unemployed, aged between 45 and 65.
The project intends to support the social inclusion of the elderly in the broader European discourse on environmental and sea protection, proposing concrete tools to help them explore marine environments. In this sense, outdoor and non-formal education will allow the target groups to broaden their gaze and understand the connections between major global issues and their daily lives, inviting them to make sustainable and responsible participatory choices.
IMPACT
The women participants are part of larger groups of families, and the sustainability menus and new food consumption skills will positively impact a much larger number of people and citizens. Participants will become promoters and ‘ambassadors’ of new daily food, shopping and waste habits, the priority of the activity being precisely the transfer of sustainable behaviours to everyday situations and environments.
Project Card:
Start: 01-10-2023 End: 30-09-2025
Project Reference: 2023-1-IT02-KA210-ADU-000151602
Programme: Erasmus+
Action Type: KA210-ADU – Small-scale Partnership in Adult Education
Coordinator: Treenacria Innovation and Creativity, Italy www.treenacria.org
Partner: S.E.A.L CYPRUS, Cyprus https://www.facebook.com/sealngocy
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