CCES Winter School 2011
16 PhD students joined the first CCES Winter School «Sustainability Science Meets Practice». They came from the Swiss institutions ETH Zurich, EAWAG, WSL, EPFL; but also from the following German and Austrian universities: Potsdam, Giessen, Berlin, Lueneburg, Bayreuth, and Graz. The PhD students covered a great variety of dissertation topics like climate change, land use, urban design or biodiversity.
In 2011, three tasks were developed for dialogues along the spectrum of information, consultation, and collaboration.
"Consultation"
The "Explorations Course" was the method preselected to implement the task on "consultation". Real stakeholders – a group of farmers - were invited to participate in the exploration course on agricultural scenarios in 2030.
"Collaboration"
The task "collaboration" evolved as knowledge exchange and learning among heterogeneous stakeholders. The task was implemented as a stakeholder workshop. Real stakeholders (e.g. farmers, landscape architects, urban planners) were invited to participate in a stakeholder workshop on biodiversity in urban settings.
"Information"
The task on "information" was about «informing the practice and/or the public as a way to develop information about a selected topic or your own research project». The group chose from a wide range of communication tools to take research findings to practitioners or the public at large. It presented the products (e.g. a website structure, media releases and brochure) and involved everybody – by using the method World Café – in feedback and discussion.
The Winter School 2011 took place in the external pageSchweizerisches Jugend- und Bildungszentrum Einsiedeln and in external pageBoldern, Männedorf/ZH. The Winter School was organized by the Competence Center Environment and Sustainability CCES of the ETH Domain. It was supported by ETH Sustainability, the coordination office for sustainability at ETH Zurich, and Innovedum, the ETH fund fostering teaching innovation projects at ETH Zurich.