CVC3 | Moosburg and Bled | 3 - 6 October 2013
From 3rd to 6th of October the Creative Villages Conference took place in Moosburg/Carinthia as well as in Bled/Slovenia. The main topic of the conference was education and the fact that every community can play a major role in improving the local education situation. A lot of valuable ideas where generated and the participants returned home with specific concepts to improve the situation in their home villages.
A centre for topics concerning the future in Bled/Slovenia.
A field trip in Bled at the beginning of the conference on Thursday led to the “Jury tower” of the well-known rowing centre, in which the exhibition “cold and hot – building culture in the sea- and thermal region of the Adriatic alps” was inaugurated. During the excursion the redesigning of the rowing centre, the sea promenade as well as the general development of Bled was presented. On Friday, the main topic was education in Bled. The kindergarten, the primary school and the secondary school of Bled are going to be renovated soon and the head of the village department Matjaž Berčon and the architect Peter Šenk introduced the participants to the project. A major consideration of the project was to keep the educational centre in the village centre instead of building it outside at the municipal border.
Moosburg – Education is essential for communal development
The conference in Moosburg started with a get-together and a field trip in small groups through Moosburg. Afterwards the outdoor-exhibition “Moosburg scans” was inaugurated. The photographer and artist Kurt Hörbst took pictures of 40 citizens of Moosburg lying on the ground and formed realistic images in real size. The open air project is meant to stimulate the village centre and to generate spatial quality – also in the evening, when the images are illuminated.
European education conference
On Saturday the European education conference was initiated and representatives of the Creative Villages Bled, Hinterstoder, Illingen, Marianka, Moosburg, Munderfing, Sălişte and Zwischenwasser as well as other visitors participated in the conference. In the gym of the educational campus of Moosburg, experts of various fields of education presented their knowledge and experience. Among them were the professor of tuitional- and educational science of the Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt Florian Müller, the mayor and initiator of the educational campus Herbert Gaggl as well as Hubert Pirker, representative of the European parliament and Rudolf Altersbergerl, educational authority of Carinthia. Furthermore the governor of Carinthia, Peter Kaiser and Kurt Nekula, head of the Ministry of education, spoke to the audience about the future of education in Carinthia.
“The future of education in rural areas” was also the main topic for the following workshops, where the participants dealt with aspects of development of educational projects as well as the class room in the future. The village Moosburg has set themselves the goal to become “the educational village in Austria” until 2020. Moosburg can be seen as a best-practice example for the other participating communities. Especially the educational campus, which represents the cooperation between kindergarten, primary school and new secondary school and the structural and methodical changes in Moosburg encouraged new thinking. An example for the new approach is the mutual continued education of all three educational institutions as well as the synergies of the usage of common resources.
Beside the individual learning outcomes of all participants and representatives of the Creative Villages, a common conclusion was generated. One major factor of educational development can be found in the cooperation of the different educational institutions such as kindergarten, primary school and secondary school, together with the awareness for development in this area. All representatives of the Creative villages returned home with valuable ideas and a “declaration for the future of education”, which sums up the main ideas of the Creative Villages Conference in Moosburg and Bled.
