During the week of 7-11 March 2011, the Sustainability Institute is co-hosting with the Learning Development Institute, Fundacion Cultura de Paz, Universe Awareness (UNAWE) and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization the Fouth Advanced International Colloquiem on Building the Scientific Mind. The theme for this year’s colloquiem is Learning for Sustainable Futures.
The Fourth Colloquiem follows in the footsepts of the three previous UNESCO-organised colloquia that took place in Cairo in 2009, Vancouver in 2007 and The Netherlands in 2005. The focus of the Fourth Colloquiem is the mutually inclusive character of content, context and value-driven process in the search for sustainable futures. The conference is less interested in the question of what should be learned (such as fragmented pieces of knowledge that seem to be missing from an already overloaded curriculum) than in how we learn, i.e. what the values are that should drive the learning process and that must inspire the learning environment so that, eventually, humans will evolve, culturally, to interact more harmoniously with their environment. As the conference organisers put it in the programme: “We therefore wish to explore what conditions must be present in the environment for learning behaviour to emerge that allows humans, individually and collectively, to interact with their environment in ways that lead to sustainable futures.”