Zaključek čezmejnega projekta “Mura Calling” I Abschluss des grenzüberschreitenden Projekts „Mura Calling“

Yesterday marked the closing event of the cross-border Interreg SI–AT project titled “Mura Calling.” The project’s main goal was to raise awareness among secondary school students about the Mura-Drava-Danube Biosphere Reserve—which spans five countries—and to foster a shared bioregional identity. Secondary school students, elementary school students, and preschoolers explored the region’s natural environment and its potential through hands-on learning. Nika Škof took a closer look at how the closing event went and what the young people learned.

Včeraj je potekala zaključna prireditev čezmejnega projekta Interreg SI–AT z naslovom Mura Calling. Glavni namen projekta je bil krepitev ozaveščenosti o pet državnem Biosfernem območju Mura-Drava-Donava med srednješolci ter oblikovanje skupne bioregionalne identitete. Dijaki, osnovnošolci pa tudi otroci iz vrtca, so preko praktičnega učenja raziskovali naravno okolje in potenciale regije. Kako je potekalo sklepno dejanje in kaj so se mladi naučili, je preverila Nika Škof.

Radio Broadcast Transcript

Hello, Styria. Sobota. Lučane. Lojča. Radgona. Radkersburg. Hello, Styria.  The Slovenia-Austria Interreg project “Mura Calling” brought together more than 200 children and young people from Slovenia and Austria at the closing event in Radgona, where they were also joined by students from Croatia and Hungary. The conceptual foundation of the project was developed some time ago by Franz Nahrada, the director and founder of the educational initiative and nonprofit association “Dorf Uni.”

Franz Nahrada

So the idea behind it was actually that the biosphere presents us with an incredible challenge in every area—whether it’s tourism, the economy, culture—whatever it may be. We suddenly realize that we’ve treated nature relatively—well, we’ve treated it, so to speak, as a residual factor—but in reality, it’s a living entity with which we must connect. This is becoming increasingly evident. And above all, it’s something much larger than we’re used to seeing. It’s a vast area spanning five countries. And if we succeed, with the help of this shared connection to nature, in strengthening social, cultural, and political bonds, so to speak, and in saying, “Okay, we are a bioregion, and with that bioregion come a thousand things we can do together,” then that’s actually a major challenge, as I said. And how do you tackle such a challenge? Where do you start to raise awareness among the population? And here, the project’s approach has been to focus on schools for now.

Specifically, we’re focusing on schools that are—if you will—already more academically demanding, namely upper secondary schools, the gymnasiums, and we’re stepping up to the plate, aiming to be the spearhead of an awareness campaign about the biosphere. That was a bit of a risk, but we managed to pull it off—our Slovenian project partners brought in the Ljutomer Gymnasium, and we succeeded in getting the BORG ( ) here in Bad Radkersburg on board. I can only say that they’re really throwing themselves into this with great enthusiasm, so to speak. Of course, it also helped that we’ve introduced a new method of learning and teaching here. It’s called place-based education, where we can simply use digital tools to analyze the location we’re currently in. We can gather a vast amount of information about the trees, cultural monuments, and everything else, so to speak, and meaningfully connect it all. That’s actually what the schools really appreciated, because it brings their lessons to life. So for me, the key point is that we had a really wonderful kickoff event. That is, we have a project partner that’s perfectly suited for this: Mura Rafting. They simply picked us up here in Radlesburg, and we rafted down the Mur for three hours—with over 35 students—and were warmly welcomed on Liebesinsel, where there was also a panel discussion. I spoke there as well, and so on. It was a good start in and of itself; it took place in October.

But we said that what we were still missing a bit was this dialogue—that is, really creating an environment with the schools and the students, so to speak, where we have a little time to get to know one another. And that’s very important to me now, given that we share this common future. The Results of the Project We’ll certainly put together a final report—a nice brochure. We want to produce it in five languages if possible. That means we definitely want to include Croatian, Hungarian, and Serbian as well. Today we also have observers from high schools in Hungary and Croatia, specifically from Lenti and Dzakowetz. We are determined to ensure that we carry out follow-up projects to further the mapping of the biosphere and to communicate and discuss with one another the questions that arise from it—the many questions and the many possibilities.

It’s hard for me to say right now that this project already provides the means to do that. It doesn’t. The project was intended to bring together a certain number of people—Interreg has this “magic number” of 200—and at some point, you have to bring them together for a local event, so to speak. But for us, the real result is that we’re also crafting a message out of it—a message that resonates and can be shared.

Knut Wimberger

It all started when Franz Nahrada was brought to my attention three times. Three different people told me within a matter of weeks, “You have to meet Franz—you two have a lot in common.” Then I met Franz Nahrada, I think, two years ago in Vienna. We talked; he has a very political outlook and knows that, with our nation-states in Europe—and in the world as a whole—we’ve somehow reached a dead end. So we need different forms of organization. I come more from an educational background—I’m a teacher, after all—but I also work in software development. And for me, it’s about bringing about change within the education system.

We found a lot of common ground there, and Franz then started this project here in Bad Radkersburg, together with Simon from the Slovenian side. They called it “Mura Calling.” They were missing someone with educational expertise in open-space learning. And that’s when Franz Nahrada invited me to contribute here. The background is this: if you look at school systems—and especially industrial school systems, which we’ve had for about 150 years—we spend most of our time in the classroom. So, regardless of that, you can ask anyone who’s been to school, “How much time did you spend outside, and how much in the classroom?” And most people will say it was probably 90 percent more—more than 90 percent—inside. And it’s precisely this imbalance that’s the problem. We know we have many issues. We have problems with mental health, with emotional well-being; we have problems with obesity; we don’t get enough exercise; and, above all, we’re now facing a climate crisis. We can’t learn inside a closed building how our ecosystems are changing if we don’t go outside. And to acquire all these skills, we need to move our lessons outdoors. But the issue is that we don’t have the skills to do that. Within this project, we’ve tried to bring precisely these skills to the table—on the one hand through the Place-Based Learning method, and on the other hand through this software solution.

I’ll show you a small infographic here, but of course I can also explain it to the audience. So, essentially, we’re integrating permaculture with learning from an educational perspective. And the idea is that we divide things into zones, so to speak. Zone 0 is the school building—it’s essentially that enclosed space where students and teachers currently spend most of their time. Zone 1 would be the school’s surroundings—perhaps the school garden or the neighborhood; Zone 2 is the entire community; Zone 3 is the region. And so it goes, moving into ever-larger zones. Of course, we can’t spend all our time in Zone 5 right now, but we need to gradually try to spend more time at home, to see how nature is changing due to climate change, and to identify where there are problems in the communities in which the school is embedded.

The software is now designed to help teachers and students venture further beyond this “Zone 0”—the school building and the classroom. The question now is: How do we do that? The software offers several features. The first feature is that it allows for very intuitive mapping. I can map large trees, rocks, waterfalls, and other natural elements. But I can also, for example, map a building or a culturally significant site. How does this differ from other software solutions? There’s, for instance, the well-known iNaturalist, where you can record nature observations using an app.

The difference is that iNaturalist is often about, for example, a plant that blooms somewhere for only a few months or a butterfly you’ve seen somewhere and then it’s gone again. You can observe those. What we do is create what are called semi-permanent maps, and these maps are then grouped into walks, which in turn form open-space classes. These are permanent and can be used repeatedly throughout the annual cycle.

What does that mean for me as a teacher? I can say that, as a teacher, I can develop, for example, ten such hikes and explore these ecosystems with my students throughout the annual cycle. And I don’t have to just—well, I can guide them if I want to, but I can also let the students play on their own.
And we’ve drawn inspiration from various existing solutions. Many people are familiar with Pokémon Go. It’s a fun app in and of itself, I think, but it’s not open source. It’s a company that makes a massive amount of money from it—I believe, 5 billion euros a year. You’re outside when you play it, but you don’t learn anything in the process. So it’s all virtual. And with our software, you can really learn through real elements in nature. And that creates what are called “primary experiences.” So that’s the educational background—gaining primary experiences: Where is the big tree? What kinds of trees are there here? What kinds of birds do we have around here? And all this knowledge, which used to be indigenous knowledge, we’ve forgotten. We are no longer indigenous people. We’ve become very disconnected from nature. And this climate crisis, this ecological crisis we’re currently facing, is the result of our loss of connection to nature. In other words, the overarching learning goal that the app aims to support is for us to become indigenous peoples once again—and we need to start as soon as possible, beginning with young children.

In that regard, the question always comes back: what do you do with an app when working with young children or elementary school students? In that case, the app is used solely by the teacher, as a sort of cheat sheet. That is, the teacher uses the app to guide the children into nature; they’ve prepared it well, just like a lesson in the classroom, but they move confidently outdoors—and that confidence is lacking in many teachers because they don’t learn that in their training. Yes, well, I think that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

Maybe I should add one more thing: there are a lot of gamification elements built into the app that are designed to make learning easier, but also to make it more interesting. So you collect points, there’s a leaderboard, and schools could compete against each other a bit to see who’s better—which class ultimately collects the most data in their home community. For the age group up to about 14 or 15 years old, the goal is to have collected all the important mapping data that’s been done in their own home community.

For every feature you’ve mapped—I don’t know, the big oak tree over there, the little pond back there—you earn points, and when you move on to high school, you basically step out of the game and become a creator yourself. So the idea is basically this: students—who are already supposed to be learning a lot of science subjects and content—become users themselves and create their own routes. So ultimately, the process is always divided into three parts. You start by creating a map. It can really be anything that has a certain degree of consistency. It just doesn’t make sense, for example, to map a butterfly. For that, you have to use iNaturalist. I observed this butterfly here and there yesterday; today I don’t know where it is. So the point is to map permanent elements. The students do this. They then work in peer groups, review each other’s work, and combine these maps into routes. They can add questions to these “ ” routes—so they really take on an active role and decide, “OK, this question makes sense for this map.” And if I take this seriously within the classroom, then I have to do research on the topic, because otherwise I’ll be asking completely superficial questions, and these learning formats will end up being very superficial as well. So high school students are given the responsibility to design quests with valuable content—and we call them quests because it’s all part of gamification.

Just like in games, the quest is the search, and within that quest I can incorporate a wide variety of content. So a history teacher might say, “For this semester project, instead of boring presentations, maybe I’ll tell my students: Bad Radkersburg is a city with a truly fascinating history.” “Working in teams of three students, you’ll now create a quest about the town’s historical development.” Similarly, a geography teacher might say, “Take a look at the town of Bad Radkersburg from a traffic safety perspective. “Where are the problems? What works? What doesn’t work?” And then he creates a quest around that. So it really becomes a project organized across disciplines, and I’m no longer so firmly tied to these individual subjects because I have to integrate language skills and conduct research—but the teacher can still tailor it to their needs.

We’ve already written a relatively long report on the project within our association, because we were here for two weeks last October, I believe. So as part of the project, when you immerse yourself in a place, you naturally learn a great deal through conversations with people, as well as through walks and hikes in the region. You learn a great deal. What we’ve observed, on the one hand, is the theme of history, because we’re in a border region here and Bad Radkersburg holds a special place. The second theme is this bioregional identity, which is why we got involved in the project in the first place. How can we bring these different linguistic groups in this region to a common ground and connect them with one another? How can we create a bioregional identity here? And the third theme was actually this ecological crisis, because we discovered that the Mur River was heavily straightened about 150 years ago as part of this industrial landscaping. It used to be a broad, expansive ecosystem that absorbed water like a sponge but also released it again. And now it’s actually a relatively impoverished ecosystem—it may look green, but it’s threatened, and there’s a certain risk that this riverbed will be washed away, causing the water to seep away and disappear entirely. That would create a great many problems here.

But that’s essentially the ecological—and even scientific—analysis of the problems. For today’s project and for the structure itself, it was actually important to me from an educational perspective that an emotional connection be established. That’s why we recommended incorporating two elements. I became familiar with these two elements in Japan; I spent 20 years in Asia, and it was in Japan that I discovered Shintoism. Unlike what’s customary here, it’s a religion deeply connected to nature, in which it’s believed that everything has a spirit. There, old trees can play a role similar to that of churches here, and they’re decorated like venerable fellow citizens. We’ve transformed these forms of decoration from Shintoism into educational formats and incorporated them here.

So, you usually twist ropes made from sustainable materials—such as sisal rope—to create what are called shimenawa in Japanese. These are ropes that mark a tree as special. You can then decorate these ropes with small wooden plaques called “ema”—we already did this in October with the MIT Middle School, and we did it again today. These ema plaques—the word “ema” actually means “horse” in Japanese, because in the past horses were sacrificed, but that became too expensive, so people switched to wooden plaques instead—and these wooden plaques are then inscribed with whatever you like. So you can write a prayer, a wish, or a thought to leave there. And usually, everyone just wishes for good things—which makes you wonder, “Why is there so much bad in the world?”

I think it worked out really well again today, because it’s an emotional experience that allows us to connect deeply with a space. And we need—first and foremost, this is a problem in our school system—we need that emotional connection first so that we can then learn about something. Emotional connections open doors, open the heart, and open the mind. And then the mind should follow. In school, we do it exactly the other way around. It’s the mind first—you have to learn this, that, and the other thing and reproduce it on a standardized test—while that emotional connection, where we first experience our living spaces together with the people who share them with us and spend time together, happens very rarely, far too rarely. So I think that worked out quite well today. I don’t know who saw the little signs, but we’ve received some good news, and that makes me happy because it happens time and again, even though these are actually relatively small workshops. We hold three-hour workshops with the schools, and in October we passed this knowledge on to BORG, and the teachers here prepared this on their own for today. It’s also nice to see that they can do it on their own.

Students from the region speak up

For me, the collaboration was particularly interesting—especially since I also visited the kindergarten—and the fact that we were able to teach the little kids about the environment and things like that. To be honest, the best part was the collaboration between young and old, and between slightly older people and the very little ones.

So I worked with the elementary school kids today, and I thought it was amazing how interested they were and how well they discussed all the trees. And I think they especially liked the station with the hunters because they got to see the dogs there and experience all sorts of different things.
I really enjoyed it, and there were just so many wonderful interactions between young and old. I knew almost nothing about the project earlier—I didn’t even know what a biosphere reserve actually was. I was aware of the MUR River and the MUR landscape, but I’d never really thought about what the biosphere reserve actually is and how many opportunities it offers us.

I feel the same way as Isabella—I’m from Bad Gleichenberg, which is a bit farther away from Bad Radkersburg, and before this, I didn’t really know what a biosphere reserve was or that we actually had one right next to our school. That’s why it was so interesting for me to learn about it and be able to share that knowledge with others.

Well, I think the main opportunities are that we can simply communicate well with one another across borders and that, even though we’re from different countries, there’s something that connects us. And that’s the Mur River and the Mur landscape. And I think that’s such an important opportunity that we don’t really appreciate it enough. That’s why I find it so valuable that we have the chance to work together with such a wide variety of countries and to exchange ideas.

I also think—as you can see here—that everyone works with everyone else, whether you’re from Slovenia or Austria. The Mur River brings us together, and for me personally, the Mur landscape is—for example, when I go for a walk—very, very beautiful, and I’m so grateful every time that I get to live here and experience this, that we have such great cooperation and so many opportunities to learn about other countries.

So I would definitely do this project again, and I would definitely participate again, because I really enjoyed it—especially working with the elementary school kids—since the children were all so sweet and open, and they came right up to us and were interested in us. And I just thought it was so wonderful to see everyone standing there, all chatting with one another. And I think that really makes a difference—it’s a wonderful project.

So I’d definitely want to participate, because I personally enjoy working with young children, but also because it’s really about being together and supporting one another, and you just see how well we can collaborate with other countries.

Nina Voglmeir, teacher at BORG Bad Radkersburg

So today, the kids followed different scavenger hunt routes. It’s like geocaching—scavenger hunts where you navigate using your cell phone, and then you’re presented with a question about what you see or an information page. But you don’t need to hammer a nail into a tree anymore—it’s all on your phone, and then you’re directed online to the next location. Different groups and age groups followed different routes, with various stops and varying levels of difficulty for the tasks in some cases. That was the learning aspect of the activity.

At the gathering on Frauenplatz, the children artistically designed tree decorations expressing their wishes for the future—for the future of the planet, the biosphere, and their own futures—and these decorations will remain on display for tourists to see over the next few months. Now there’s a get-together for the students so they can engage in a bit of cross-border exchange through multilingualism, followed by a final feedback session.

At the heart of it all is the app. The app developed by Knut Wimberger—Green Steps’ ARK—is absolutely fantastic. It makes outdoor education a tangible experience for young people, and it’s truly a really cool project. Today’s event was, of course, characterized by a great deal of diversity, because we had all age groups from kindergarten through age 18—spanning two kindergartens, a bilingual elementary school, a bilingual middle school (i.e., primary school), Apace, which was bilingual, and Lüttomer Gymnasium, which was also bilingual.Then there were students from Hungary and Chakovec as well. In other words, this multilingualism and the varying educational levels presented a major challenge.

In addition, we had a few difficulties with the cell phone providers, whose navigation sometimes had glitches, but those are all teething problems. I’ve heard back that the children really enjoyed it. Our students also looked after the younger children. In other words, there’s intergenerational work—educational work—that some really enjoyed. Of course, this also helps with career planning and future aspirations.

So today marked the start of expanding this app’s use toward the Mur-Drau-Danube Biosphere Reserve. In other words, since this app makes it possible to experience the local environment in a very realistic way, we’d like to extend its use to the biosphere reserve along the river. And that would be an idea for the municipalities—to make it a bit more financially feasible and manageable. Schools can’t handle this on a large scale on their own, and neither can small organizations.

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