In this episode, I am speaking to Giovanni Ciarlo (on Linkedin) from Gaia Education. He has developed their online Design for Sustainability programme, an intense year-long project that manages to engage, retain and transform learners ... so I was very curious to hear how they achieve that. We also talk about Gaia's face-to-face programmes, about possibilities for collaborations between providers of such experiential education and established universities and much more.

We didn't speak about that explicitly, but Gaia provides their curriculum for the four-week face-to-face course as a free download to inspire others to contribute to their educational mission. If you are looking for experiential approaches to anything sustainability-related, for any educational context, it's worth having a look here.

If you have any comments or questions, I'd be happy to hear from you. Email me at lukas.wallrich@empower-training.de

Theme music from https://filmmusic.io: "Zigzag" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

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Mia Eskelund (@miaeskelund on Twitter) is the co-founder and CEO of SkySchool. They have offered a unique model of blended learning to make secondary education available to refugees online.

In this interview, we speak about Mia's experience of starting this educational social enterprise, about advice for others who want to get going, and about their educational model that emphasizes lifeworthy learning. If you want to read a mini-summary of that concept as it applies to teaching in schools, have a look here.

If you have any comments or questions, I'd be happy to hear from you. Email me at lukas.wallrich@empower-training.de

Theme music from https://filmmusic.io: "Zigzag" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)

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Prof Wolfgang Dietrich holds the UNESCO Chair of Peace Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. There he runs the MA in Peace Studies, a programme that combines academic rigour with personal reflection and tough and transformative experiential learning.

In this interview, we speak about his experiences in Central America as an evaluator of NGO programmes, and how this led him to believe that the trainer of peace workers needed to be changed fundamentally. We speak about the design of the MA, and about the notion of Transrational Peace, Prof Dietrich's theoretical approach that informs his pedagogy and that of a large network of partners worldwide. Finally, we speak about pedagogical innovation in large universities, the need for transdisciplinarity and opportunities to make education as a whole more peaceful.

If you want to get more ideas for how to implement these ideas into your educational practice, Prof Dietrich has published a trilogy of books about Transrational Peace, including a volume on breath-oriented, voice-oriented and movement-oriented approaches to training peace workers, that can inspire other educators as well.

If you have any comments or questions, I'd be happy to hear from you. Email me at [email protected]

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Laurence Nodder is the Rektor of UWC Robert Bosch College in Freiburg, Germany. That school, as well as Waterford Kamhlaba in eSwatini, where he worked before and where I was his student, are part of the UWC movement.

We also speak about his experiences of working in education under apartheid, the racist system of segregation in place in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. If you want to get an impression of education for Black students under apartheid, alongside the inspiring resistance that took place against it, the movie Sarafina is very much worth watching.

If you have any comments or questions, I'd be happy to hear from you. Email me at [email protected]

Theme music from https://filmmusic.io:

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