Nelly Kostoulas-Makrakis, Associate professor of Teaching Methodology and Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Crete, is not only an Earth Charter Friend, but also very active using the Earth Charter in her teachings. She challenges her students to engage in all types of sustainability justice, as described in the Earth Charter.
Through Prof. Kostaulas-Makrakis, we received two very interesting articles from her hand in which she explains very well why the EC is valuable in teachings, how it can be applied, and what a difference using the principles can make in people’s everyday life and the choices people make. The first article is titled ¨The Earth Charter through the Lenses of Sustainability Justice¨, and it was written for the Ninth International Conference in Open & Distance Learning, held in November 2017 in Athens, Greece.
The second paper is called ¨Integrating Sustainable Happiness in pre-Service Teacher Training Enabled through the Earth Charter Lenses¨.
Building on Mirian Vilela’s (2014:xxxiii) statement “… the transformation we all seek and that will make a just, sustainable, and peaceful world will require that we reconnect our inner selves with the larger community of life, through both a change of mind and a change of heart”; Prof. Kostoulas-Makrakis explains how merging the Head, the Heart, and the Hand responds to the need for adopting a holistic approach to teaching and learning to live together sustainably (Kostoulas-Makrakis, 2014). The head is about cognitive function and being logical, while the heart is about affective function, ethics, values, emotions, feelings, and the hands are about human agency, which is the disposition and ability to act as agents of change.
Especially for people working in the field of education, it is highly recommended to read these articles and use the information to help finding methods of implementing the principles of the Earth Charter for educational purposes.
A very special thank you to Nelly Kostoulas-Makrakis for sharing both articles.
Download here both articles.