LIBRI DI MICHELA MAYER

Le riflessioni emerse dalla Settimana di Educazione allo Sviluppo Sostenibile sul tema dei rifiuti, un utile strumento per ripensare una questione che può essere affrontata e risolta solo coinvolgendo i cittadini, impegnando le istituzioni e attraverso una gestione industriale efficace, al fine di incoraggiare la riduzione dei rifiuti e la promozione di forme valide di raccolta differenziata, con l’obiettivo di far diventare il rifiuto una risorsa.

Un approccio "istituzionale" all’Educazione Ambientale e allo Sviluppo Sostenibile. Una ricerca internazionale su linee di tendenza e possibili scenari per le "ecoscuole" - The article reports the results of a comparative research study based on information collected from 13 country reports on implicit and explicit criteria guiding Eco-schools’ development processes in whole school plans, inspired by Environmental Education values and principles. The research was carried on by the ENSI - Environment and School Initiatives - international network, within the context of a Comenius 3 network, the SEED, School Development through Environmental Education network. The participating countries were: Australia, Austria, Belgium - Flemish Community, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Norway, Spain (Catalonia), and Sweden. By analysing trends and divergences in the reports, the article focus on identiAbstracts fying the visions of the future world that are embedded in the Eco-schools’ programmes and what conceptualisation of learning-teaching processes and school development can be identified in this work. The outcome of analysis results in scenarios which allow to understand future trends and which can also be used to orient future choices. The whole research, is published in English and can be downloaded from the website www.ensi.org.

In 1979 Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote a book on Artificial Intelligence Godel. Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid that became a milestone in the international debate on the complexity of human thinking in its different expressions. The reflection proposed in this paper tries to catch the up-to dateness of the book, and the possibilities of its use, in a debate that sees sustainability mainly as a need for changes toward ways of thinking and therefore of dialogue, conversation, educational intervention that respect and value this complexity. Concepts as the ones of recursivity or auto-referenciality must today be connected with the ones of ‘redundancy’ and ‘multiplicity’ as well as with the concept of participation, with the aim of build contexts where new, more complex, ways to interpret the world, and to act on the world, could "emerge .