Over these 10 years, the scholars forming the UNISCAPE group at the University of Naples Federico II have organized a number of international events, also as a result of the initiatives encouraged and promoted by the International Association. Let me mention a few: the International Colloquium entitled “Incontri sul paesaggio: tra letteratura e scienza” (“Meetings on Landscape, between literature and science) on 23-24 June 2012; The Round Table on the Management of Landscape in the Region of Campania, also in June 2012; the Internationl UNISCAPE En-Route Seminar entitled “Recovering river landscape” on 28-30 September 2015. There have been also many local initiatives and the Pilot Project Paesaggio da tutti – Paesaggio per tutti (“Landscape by everybody – Landscape for everybody”), and obviously the numerous publications produced all along.
We think it is crucial to lead the younger generation into acquiring full awareness of their own active role in shaping the context – that is to say the notion that context itself is the product of natural and/of human factors and their inter-relations. Hence, our Group has been promoting actions that will “sensitize” these generations to the landscape and the accompanying issues.
We nourish the persuasion that knowledge and awareness are the prerequisites for appropriate and adequate action, that is to say the pursuit of adequate policies of management and protection.
Following an Agreement Protocol between the University of Naples and the Education Office of the Campania Region (depending of the Ministry of Education), the Pilot Project Paesaggio da tutti – Paesaggio per tutti was launched, since the starting point for the information and training of individuals must necessarily be their early contact years with civil society, hence primary school and middle school. “Educating and forming the sensitivity of youth” is the motto which sums up the method whereby the Project is to reach its objective, that is to say the preparation of schoolteachers who are constantly in touch with and ready to devote their professional competences to the young school population.
The Project is, then, focused on providing primary and middle school teachers with specialist knowledge which, using the most appropriate language and approach, they will in turn convey to and shape in the minds of the young, according to the objectives of the European Landscape Convention. Eighty teachers of primary and middle schools throughout the Region of Campania will be the main referents in the Project, which will consist of a) regular classroom work, with ex-cathedra lessons and guided workshops, and b) local field experience in the referent teachers’ respective school districts. These activities will then converge in 3 Final meetings with the purpose of discussing, assessing and harmonising the results of local experience so as to define a manual for good practice.
This dynamic involves directly about 2,800 people every year, comprising both teachers and students, for each year of activity. Besides these actors, there are those who will be involved indirectly in the discussion of landscape through fieldwork and questionnaires.
To conclude, one the project’s peculiar traits, or perhaps its most peculiar trait, is therefore its multiplier effect, conveying to the young and also in part to the older generations the concept of landscape, as set and established in the European Convention. I think that it is by working with the new generations that the aims of the European Landscape Convention will be rapidly and concretely fulfilled.
Elvira Petroncelli – UNISCAPE Delegate
6 June 2018