Drink your city

Education for transition :: tea bag production at Træstubben

“Nowadays, children know more corporate logo’s and brands than bird or tree species.”

And so what? — Would the knowledge of species automatically guarantee, that you care about them and achieve action competence?

We relocate the labels!

Tea bag production of herbs from the local park.

This session is one of those, I like to mention, when asked about education for transition, in Danish omstillingsformidling.

You can realise this setting with children from the age of 3 years and up to adult groups.

I begin asking them, if we can drink the city. Hmmm, of course not really … We make a course through the garden and try to find something drinkable. We reach the rain water tank — 10,9,8,7 … 3,2,1 count down and the Træstubben waterfall turns on!

Can we drink the rain water from the city sky? — hmmm, not really. There may be pollution like small particles and dirt from the church roof, where we collect it from.

What than? — What do we need the hand swing sewing machines for? — they ask, when back in the circle. Then I tell them that we need the machines, to produce something, so we can drink the city. I caress my arms and smell my hands — do I smell of something? They imitate the movement and then I tell them to go around in the garden and caress the leaves of the plants. Try to find one that smells of lemon! They make their round and discover the smell of the different herbs in the garden: lemon balm, spearmint, cicely, strawberry leaves, thyme, blackcurrant leaves, nettle leaves, … . All this herbs are perfect for a tea blend!

See more pictures here.

Here we go. Can't we make our own tea bags?! Yes, that is what we are going to do.

In the end of the session everybody has its tea bag in an envelope sewed of recycled postcards.

We sing a song with the name of all the herbs in the tea. In the end we mime how we are going to prepare the tea with our family at home. The story has to be told out there … .

One of the main education for transition element in this case, is the local production approach. We learn about nature and we make a herb tea of local resources, imitating the tea bags, that we only know from the supermarkets.

Here you can see a short film documentation of the session with a school class.

Drink your city.