Arturas Deltuva’s report of his participation in the 13th Conference of Experiential Educators in Europe

(30 April – 4 May, 2009)

I had a real pleasure to be delegated by “Via-experientia” to this conference of “Experiential educators in Europe”. It was a great and I believe a very useful experience.

More then 60 people from all over the world took part in it. More then 40 workshops were announced and organized. You can find more information here: www.eeeurope.org

The workshop about our International Academy for experiential education was one of them. The leaflet was presented and the logic of the training programme was explained. People were asked to share their experiences about how they were educated as experiential educator. What was mainly interesting for me was to find out that most of them started doing experiential learning because they participated somewhere and they liked it and were inspired do it by themselves. Some of them started looking for experiential learning as providing the alternative to the usual approaches and methods of education.

The idea of the Academy was very well accepted and many people got interested in it. There are people who are interested to join the Academy by contributing to the educational content of the Academy, but some of them have asked about opportunity to participate in it.

Good contacts were established and I am sure they will turn out to be productive contacts when the need for fruitful cooperation will come. We should discuss the need in our team and to see how we can involve people already during this pilot project maybe for the Training Course in May 2010.

Another conclusion I came to – we should participate more in such conferences and the next one is May next year in Denmark.

The workshop announcement at the conference on http://www.eeeurope.org/2009/Workshops/Page-2.html