2013 Annual Conference

Topic: From teaching to learning – when will we take it seriously in forest sciences education?

November 1st - Nov. 3rd, 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey

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About the Conference

“The shift from teaching to learning”: this formula has been increasingly used in North America as well as in Europe over the last two decades. It is connected with the shift from the Instruction Paradigm to the Learning Paradigm. According to this new paradigm education institutions have to do all they can to fulfill their ultimate responsibility, which is “to produce learning” (Barr & Tagg 1995/20041). In contrast under the traditional, dominant Instruction Paradigm “colleges have created complex structures to provide for the activity of teaching conceived primarily as delivering 50-minute lectures-the mission of a college is to deliver instruction”. Actually this move is going back to articles dealing with the role of the student as active learner as early as in the 1970s. But this more recent shift from an old to a new paradigm is more comprehensive.
Barr and Tagg say: “For many of us, the Learning Paradigm has always lived in our hearts. As teachers, we want above all else for our students to learn and succeed. But the heart's feeling has not lived clearly and powerfully in our heads.” This may be true for teachers in higher forestry education just the same. The shift from teaching to learning was included in the discussions of earlier SILVA Network conferences, but do we really take it seriously?
Let us try in our conference to bring the meaning of the shift of paradigm to a conscious level and find out, how far we already went in forest sciences education, and what we could do to make more progress.

2013 Annual Conference

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