In the National Forest Programme of Finland, forest education in schools was chosen as one of the key areas to secure a future generation’s fuller understanding of the multiple values affiliated to forests and sustainable forestry. Following the boost from the National Forest Programme, forest education in Finland has expanded and moved to new territories.
The Finnish Forest Association (FFA) has been running its school co-operation programme for decades now and sees it as important that, in order to teach sustainable forestry issues to schoolchildren, the forest professionals need to be aware of what goes on in schools and how to speak the same language as pupils.
This view has been demonstrated by the FFA participating in PAWS (roughly translated as “pedagogic work for forests in schools”), a project funded by the international EC Leonardo da Vinci programme, which promotes vocational training. The PAWS group currently comprises Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Finland and Slovakia and, by joining, the Finns discovered that other European countries have shared the concern. The aim of the project is to increase the teaching skills of forest professionals. Only after understanding how children grasp things at different ages is it possible to tailor the working methods to suit each age.
Within the FFA, Sirpa Kärkkäinen is responsible for work within schools and has seen the practical challenges in getting through to forest professionals: “A telling example of the perceptions of a primary school pupil and of how important it is to learn the way the kids think, is when a forester went to the woods with a group of children and asked them to look for human footprints in the forest,” she said.
“After much searching and frustration following the children’s’ search for actual traces made by feet, the concept was explained in more detail and they could move on with the programme.”
Contact learning
The PAWS initiative has resulted in a course which contains three contact learning periods and two distance learning periods stretching over a period of four months.
The first contact period consists of the teachers organising a field trip for primary school pupils, supervised by a professor in didactics, together with the FFA representatives. Following this, the teachers organise a field trip in their own area with the support of tutors. The forester is helped by a specially developed “excursion planner” CD-Rom, designed and programmed by London’s University of Arts, as well as a course book. The CD-Rom contains more than 100 different ideas to carry out in the forest, complete with suggestions for schedules and programmes.
This period is followed by perhaps the even more demanding task of attracting teenage pupils to take part in a forest outing. This contact learning period is again complemented by organising a field trip for 14-year-olds.
The first 11 Finnish forest teachers graduated in Helsinki last month. For the next step the plan is to come up with a joint Nordic-Baltic seminar, bringing together foresters and teachers to find new ways and tools to enhance the capabilities of foresters in education and vice versa. This forms a part of the Finnish presidency of the Nordic Council in 2007.
Finnish forest education is notable in many ways and even the country’s forest certification system has a unique feature in the form of a social criterion, which deals with forest education in schools, encouraging pupils’ forest skills. In this vein, the forestry organisations have organised many events in schools, such as forest weeks, excursions and theme days.
Providing practical opportunities as well as on-the-job training for youngsters in forestry and industry organisations is an essential part of the commitment as well.
All of Finland’s 13 regional forestry centres have drawn together action plans to improve children’s understanding and appreciation of the multiple values of forests and their sustainability. The plans have been designed in co-operation with the main forest organisations in each respective area.
