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"Incredible stories of community learning" - new post on ESD Prize Blog by winner from Jordan
A new post on the, written by Lama Khatieb of (Jordan), winner of the UNESCO-Japan Prize on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) 2017, has just been published:
"As a team of local knowledge enthusiasts, we took the plane last month to Paris, profoundly pleased to be among the winners of the UNESCO-Japan ESD Prize for the year 2017. We spent three amazing days at the UNESCO Headquarters, the team members were very warm and welcoming, making us feel like we have a family there the entire time. We were also honoured to meet the other laureates (from and ) and learn about their inspiring projects.
One of our favourite encounters in these three days was with Professor Kazuyuki Mikami, President of Miyagi University of Education, who shared incredible stories from early learnings he developed for sustainability observing his grandmother’s practices, which is part of a heritage Japanese community people still carry generation to another today. One example would be the tradition of dividing the harvest of trees into three parts, collecting only the middle third of the tree fruit, leaving the lowermost third to travellers and passers-by and top third of the tree to birds, an astounding system of resource-sharing, community cohesion and connecting to nature and land.
We spent a couple of days to explore Paris after the three-day event. We were keen to visit museums that enclose rich holdings from our region, whether it’s historic, artistic or cultural. We visited the Jacques Chirac Museum (Musée du Quai Branly), the Louvre and the Arab World Institute. We explored the local cuisine and were lucky to be invited to the house of a local family who shared with us their passion for music and dancing.
Since our return to Amman we have been busy with several projects: we are carrying on with the Traditional Music Identity Project [see photo] in three public schools; we are working on a booklet/publication on how traditional paradigms affect our ability to fabricate community solutions; and we are carrying on with our community-based tourism projects as winter is a high season for our program."
