In recent years, words such as SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) aiming for coexistence of nature and human society and sustainable development of the natural environment have come to be discussed. This project took Yokohama Minato Mirai Honcho Elementary School, which opened this year, as a case study. Three sectors (elementary school teachers, private company workers in the area where the elementary school was established, and the GCL students) got together to design an ESD (Education for Sustainable Development) program utilizing the periods of integrated study during which children consider the coexistence of nature and human society and sustainable development.

On the first day of this workshop conducted at Minato Mirai Honcho Elementary School, in teams of five to six people, we first conducted an exploration of the elementary school called “Minato Mirai Quest,” which served as an ice breaker. We set up checkpoints in the places where participants could see the view from the elementary school windows, so that participants could understand the context of the area in which the elementary school was established. Next, participants were asked to imagine themselves as people living in 2028 and to discuss the shared values of the future residents in the area. After that, they created a “communarium”- a physical representation of those future shared values. Finally, participants were asked to discuss content for the integrated study sessions that will lead to a future Minato Mirai area that has the shared values represented in the communarium. On the second day, at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Agriculture campus, we did a meta-review of the previous day’s workshop to learn how to make a workshop.

There were three major outcomes from this workshop. The first is a summary of the future shared values in the region, the second is the communarium, which physically represents the participants’ vision for the shared values of the future, and the third is a draft program of integrated study that can now be done in an elementary school. The communarium was designed to be taken home after the workshop as a reminder of the results and discussions of the workshop.