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Intercultural Education Intercultural gardens are well suited for environmental education. Different modes of dealing with nature meet each other – ecologically sound traditions and buried knowledge on subsistence can be saved. The gardeners remember their mothers who produced herbal medicine or beekeeping uncles. Positive experiences in nature and autobiographical connections are a big motivator for environmental protection and a sustainable lifestyle. Intercultural environmental education connects with the knowledge reservoirs and expertise of the gardeners – those with or without immigrant backgrounds-– making use of it for sustainability. In the field of environmental education a paradigm shift is noticeable, which only hesitatingly is accompanied by a consistent intercultural unfolding. Simultaneously, the intercultural knowledge laboratory is already a lived reality. But knowledge streams flow in pretty much one direction. Therefore, the huge potential of the migratory society lies fallow; to learn to see your own concerns through the eyes of others, to arouse curiosity, to give a chance to, to dare something new. All of this is made possible if we experiment with new ways of learning. From this perspective, intercultural knowledge is not an “exotic niche” of environmental education, that preserves its integrity as an endeavor for “white” experts, but it is a democratic undertaking with multiple perspectives, concerning everybody alike. With “Lively Soil – Lively Diversity. The Green Language of People”1) the International Gardens Göttingen in 2001 developed for the first time an intercultural environmental education project, dealing with the diversity of culturally specific and biographical access to nature. They obtained a subsidy for this from the federal environment ministry. Nowadays educational activities in different areas are taking place: seed multiplication, beekeeping, food preservation as well as nutrition and health Stiftung Interkultur fosters activities with explicit intercultural educational goals. Intercultural Gardens Are Learning Environments ….
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Initiated and sponsored by Stiftungsgemeinschaft anstiftung & ertomis
