A pleasure yesterday to be part of a South west Learning for Sustainability Coalition team welcoming visitors from the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Tel Aviv to the University of Bath.
The Center is:
"dedicated to building a sustainable future for Israeli society - environmentally, socially and economically - through education and reflective activism. Our strategies include leadership development, education, working with government and non-government organizations, and fostering activism and community-based projects across all sectors of Israeli society."
Our visitors were David Dunetz, Hagit Gefen, Amit Lerner, and Rohan Snir, and the meeting focused on our several and varied experiences of "sustainable schools" through their Green Schools Network, and our recent sustainable schools initiative. Actually, the experiences were not all that varied, despite obvious cultural and contextual differences, and we noted so many similarities when it came to questions of how change can be stimulated and encouraged, and the constraints that affect development.
Our core questions were rather similar too. Inevitably, we touched on questions of purpose (what are schools now for?), and of the requirement for transformation (or was that reformation?), and it was instructive to note the notion (from Tel Aviv) that sustainability might be an idea that reaches across divided communities and represents some commonality of purpose.
I don't suppose that would work here ...
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