The first seminar MAKE IT CLEAR took place in Valladolid (Spain) from 9th – 14th of September. 

MAKE IT CLEAR seminar provided time and space for participants to interact: to share, discuss, adapt and renew their best practices regarding creative learning environments and to learn from each other and innovate their educational practices. 

The seminar contained the following elements:

• Getting to know each other and creating a safe learning community;
• Sharing their expertise, practices and bringing practice and concepts together. Therefore, it wasn’t only presenting and sharing, but also discussing, questioning, adapting and renewing these practices. Participants were challenged to critically and creatively look at the elements of their creative learning environments, in order to develop them further together with peers;
• Sharing their educational realities both in non-formal and formal education fields, how to build links between both fields and make a win-win situation;
• Explore what are the elements of creative learning environments;
• Participants created action plans to implement the adapted methods in their local realities. After the first seminar participants were invited to innovate their practices and experiment with newly developed local activities in their educational settings, this is what they are doing now from September, 2019 – February, 2020.

In total 22 educational professionals from Italy, Spain, Latvia and the Netherlands took part in this seminar: 5 participants from each country and 1 facilitator from the Netherlands and 1 from Spain. The seminar venue was the environmental education centre of Valladolid PRAE, which was one of the local partners of this project. By organizing seminar there we wanted to ensure that participants have a diverse variety of learning spaces to work in: indoor, outdoor (park, playground).

Partner – organizations had to make sure that each country shares 2 best practises from their experience, in total 8 diverse best practises were shared: 

• Nature art walk (natura art) PhotoVoice (visual storytelling) from Latvia, 
• The Village (social presencing) and Contemporary Pirates (critical thinking and sustainability) from the Netherlands; 
• Daily Theatre (community interactive art) and Body Theatre (body, mind and emotions) from Italy; 
• Escape rooms (playful learning) and Real iDeal (social/civic board game) from Spain. 

The core of this seminar were the good practices of creative learning environments, which will be adapted and renewed during local activities after the seminar. During the seminar each participant had an opportunity to take part in all workshops. After presenting workshops, participants analysed and adapted them in order to implement various workshops in their realities as it was mentioned above. 

The most important outcome of the seminar is the implementation plan for the good practices. We expected every good practice to be adapted and implemented at least one time in another country, to have some ‘material’ to work with in the next seminar (so at least 8 workshops). But luckily the participants have been inspired and motivated to find a lot of different environments to implement the good practices in (28 workshops, and of which the first ones have already taken place)