WESE©: A Teaching and Learning Experience on Sustainability

Abstract: Walk, Experience, Share, and Enjoy. WESE is the acronym of an experimental teaching method. Over six days, twelve students and I walk the Via degli Dei ("Way of the Gods"), crossing the Apennines with our backpacks. This is a course about sustainability, but confined to neither development nor institutional decisions: sustainability, in WESE, also refers to personal choices in everyday life. The goals, therefore, are numerous: introducing students to environmental law (by showing them the environment and its scars), discussing and living sustainability (through group dynamics), rethinking academic relationships and goals (forgetting roles and forming a little, open, community). The article does not aim at providing a short "how-to" guide, even though it shows the path that led to the creation of the method and to its first implementation. It aims at sharing an academic experience that can help in understanding sustainability through a different route, involving not just "skills" but also the ability to connect with others, to live in the territory, and to "feel".