Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 35

THROUGH ENGLISH, TOWARDS THE NATURE AND BUSINESS
Elena Simona Morariu, Şcoala Gimnazială Nr. 21 Sibiu
Abstract:
It may sound unusual, this combination of English, nature and business, however, the connection is perfectly
sensible because the development of activities-based and emotions-based process meant to develop the
awareness and consciousness of our pupils may lead to the acquisition of environmental responsibility and
problem-solving abilities which, later, will lead to achieving a better understanding of nature and a
sustainable use of natural resources. The expected result is the developing of the skills necessary to acquire
environmentally responsible attitudes in our children’s future life, both at a personal and a business level.
Thus pupils get the chance to develop their entrepreneurial skills through biology and environmental science
and, why not, English. Experiential learning is considered to be the first step in entrepreneurship education
because pupils ought to benefit from genuine, practical experiences and “life-like” learning environments as
crucial parts of an active learning. By using English to express and acquire all these goals is another plus for
our pupils’ future lives. This is in line with one of the priorities of LLL projects to contribute to the
development of the European Union as an advanced knowledge-based society with sustainable economic
development.
Key words: pupils, projects, English, nature, business, entrepreneurship.
As unusual as it may sound, bringing live animals in class in order to have an
interdisciplinary lesson, meaning a ‘combination’ of English, nature and business – the
connection is perfectly sensible since the final aim is to promote, by using the English
language, the awareness and responsibility towards nature but also to allow access to
entrepreneurial education. This idea became the starting point of a Comenius project
which, in its turn, was inspired by the results of an already existing European initiative and
new method, the “Tiere Live” project that was developed by ANL-Bavaria, an
environmental German organization. The partners in this project called ELENA, short from
“Experiential Learning and Education for Nature Awareness” were from Germany,
Hungary, Georgia and Romania.
It all started from the idea that biodiversity is one of the biggest treasures for
humans by providing basics and quality of life. The value of biodiversity is mainly
discussed in most countries’ society and politics emphasising that the issue to save
biodiversity and its sustainable use in an effective way has the same dimension and
importance as the issues of climate change. There is a need for social awareness that
individual behaviour is influencing diversity and the state of ecosystems directly. This
urges us to focus our efforts on the basics for environmental education.
On the other hand, teachers do believe and have always stressed out the
importance of activity-based learning and, in this project the focus was on learning not only
about animals but mostly WITH animals. The good emotional and physical impact of
having animals around us has been researched and proved, however it is not yet
consciously used in education – you can hardly find animals in schools partly due to health
safety regulations. From animals we learn love and also responsibility, as well as several
practical skills. Building an emotional bridge between the natural world and the children is
very important for attitude building. They will not be able to stay neutral if they touch the
natural world, and if it touches them. As a direct participant in the project, I could not help
taking the opportunity to experiment these emotions during the English classes. As a result
I suggested my eighth graders, who had already done all the activities with living animals
during the biology classes, having some special lessons in which they were supposed to
use their knowledge acquired during the biology (for the description of an animal and its
behaviour and characteristics) and technological education courses ( for the business
activity).
Together with my pupils, we decided on doing Activity 8 from WOLF/DOG Module,
with the stray dogs. I planned the exercises like this:
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