We had a really nice book launch at the Litteraturhuset in Oslo – it was a full house and there was wonderful interaction among the participants. Geir Harald Hagberg, one of the attendees, wrote a wonderful tribute on Linkedin, which you can read below (translation by Katharine Burke):
This weekend I went to a slightly different kind of book launch at Litteraturhuset in Oslo. An event that lasted more than four hours, with various professional features, panel discussions, dialogue in the room – and a charming meeting with a grandchild of about 2-3 years, who welcomed everyone, said “goodbye” when you left and thought it was completely appropriate to crawl up on grandma’s lap when she was talking on stage 🧡 There are many ways to spend a Saturday afternoon, and this book launch was a good choice.
The atmosphere in the room, the presence, the calm, the good conversations, and the way the author generously drew in other academic resource persons and gave them more space than she took herself, was in itself regenerative and in the spirit of the book itself. The conversations and insights were created jointly by everyone in the room, not just those on stage, creating community and contact in a completely different way than such events usually do.
Katharine Burke talks about how schools can facilitate giving pupils in primary and lower secondary school a deeper and more holistic understanding of nature through a deep contact with nature. There is too much focus on “doing” in what our children learn about sustainability, and too little focus on “being” and real contact with all that is alive.
One of the speakers, Jennifer McConachie, is a permaculture educator and facilitator of The Work that Reconnects. She told a beautiful story of her awakening through the creation of a garden. Of how the close contact with soil, seeds and plants gave her a deep connection with nature, where she suddenly saw her own role in a much larger whole. Not as something outside of nature, but as an important part of it.
The story tells us something about the value of school gardens and why we need to bring them back to all schools, I think. This is exactly what Katharine Burke writes about in her book Earthwards, which is full of cases and examples.
I’m looking forward to diving into the book Earthwards. I’ve only just begun.
Earthwards: Transformative Ecological Education
Katharine Burke
A timely handbook of transformative ecological education with principles, methods and projects that teachers of all subjects can use to engage students aged 7–18 across the curriculum.
