Environmental Heritage and the New Pedagogy

The UNESCO Chair "Water, Heritage and Sustainable Development," based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, is committed to develop innovative approaches to the current environmental challenges by fostering a unified scientific-humanistic pathway to the interconnected ecological contexts of nature, society, science and mentalities. Pedagogic innovation should uphold the principle that teachers educate the environment while being shaped by it. This conception lies at the core of our reflection on the future entanglements between urban and rural eco-systems and corresponds to the epistemological paradigm of the Anthropocene, according to which scientific cultures mainly emerge from socio-ecological settings which, in turn, are transformed by them, in accordance with a developmental logic that calls for a new awareness of the limits and the potentials of our technological societies.