Innovations in forest education: Insights from the best practices global competition

Abstract

Forest education is confronted with the challenge of modernizing teaching approaches and methods, particularly so in light of changing employment and societal needs. Many innovative teaching methods are developed by multiple instructors and can be found at the local scales. They have a great and largely untapped potential for being recognized, further developed, and up-scaled. In order to facilitate this social innovation process, a global competition on the best teaching practices in forest education was conducted. The competition attracted 71 applications from 23 countries addressing primary to tertiary education levels. A selection process, which was based on pedagogical criteria, innovation, and demonstrable results, yielded ten short-listed finalists, and ultimately two winners. In this article we provide insights into the teaching innovations of those finalists, with special emphasis on the following two winners: “FOREST 101” programme, Korean Forest Welfare Institute, from the Republic of Korea, focused on stimulating the interests and creativity of vulnerable teenagers through forest-related activities. The other winner was “The Asia Pacific Forest Education Coordination Mechanism (AP-FECM)”, a tertiary level initiative, which featured among others, a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on sustainable forest management, and increasing access to e-learning to a wider audience. Both initiatives demonstrated commitment to developing strong pedagogical practices and networking beyond their frontiers through collaborations among institutions and individuals. The results of the best practices competition and this article can be useful to inform and inspire teachers and education policy-makers in other localities about different ways of teaching forest-related subjects, developing a community of innovative teaching practice, and exchanging teaching methods globally.