RELEARNING

The UPV/EHU summer courses arrive at their 40th edition with an invitation to reflect about the future.

The historic headquarters of the BBVA foundation in Bilbao saw the presentation of the 40th edition of the Summer Courses by president and rector of the UPV/EHU Eva Ferreira, director of the BBVA foundation Rafael Pardo and academic director of the Summer Courses Itziar Alkorta.

Putting us in a position to relearn is what this pandemic may be leaving us as a legacy. While the word "learning" has been the common thread running through 40 years of UPV/EHU Summer Courses, this year sees a special approach to the concept. We have to learn in a different way, or maybe we have to learn what we have forgotten or left behind us. In just a year and a half, reality has made us look again at our own vulnerability, our limitations and our very nature.

Throughout these 40 years it has been our job to provide a forum for up-to-the-minute discussion of everything that is happening and emerging in the world, its problems and its advances. We continue to do this, but we also believe that the leaps in our learning process must be outwards, not inwards. This is one of the lessons of this pandemic.

In summer 2020 the UPV/EHU Summer Courses showed their strength and vigour. Others failed in the attempt, while we carried on forging ahead. We learned a lot about how to react, situate ourselves and relocate ourselves in a changed world. We are now able to use this experience in the manner of messenger RNA. We believe we can be viral and serve as a tool so that our courses can pass on the message to society. We have to re-situate ourselves and it is now the job of the UPV/EHU Summer Courses to do just this.

This year we once again offer a programme that is both physical and live online, a formula that worked well in 2020 and gave us the chance to reach out to students further away geographically but who are now close to us because we have started to get to know one another. We have overcome barriers and now we reach all five continents.

What we offer revolves around seven vectors, for each of which we take the odd example to illustrate the rich, varied range on offer:

Education as a factor in the development of society. What and how to teach. Learning to learn and learning to teach. Learning from the best experiences and looking at children, who are the ones who will have to build a fairer, more sustainable and therefore richer society. Learning that an unequal society is not sustainable.

Courses like Eskolaren erronka digitalak/Digital challenges to the school will enable us to share discussion about the digital skills needed by the schools of the future.

Ageing. We live in an ageing society, and this is only going to increase, while at the same time posing a challenge - but how do we want to live in our old age?  What model of citizen do we want? How can we rethink our habitable spaces, in both town and country, to achieve a socially sustainable model for living together? These and other courses, like the one about the Pact Between Generations, will be given by top-flight professionals and academics.

Environmental, economic and social sustainability. We face a total rethink of our lifestyles to protect the environment. Reviving old ways while updating them thanks to new technologies. Economic sustainability, because we cannot close one door without opening another, and social sustainability because our cultures also need rethinking. This questions will be dealt with in Summer Courses like the one presented by BC3 entitled "Green Deal: a turning point in the climate crisis?"

The Donostia Sustainability Forum, which sprang from the UPV/EHU Summer Courses, offers several options, the content of which we will be announcing soon.

Pandemic. COVID-19 caught us unawares and from one moment to the next everything turned complicated; we saw the vulnerability of the human race, its gods with feet of clay and its colossal mistakes. Hidden realities emerged that shook the foundations of our progress, our health system and our scale of moral values. We need to learn, relearn and look in the right direction. To relearn, for example, that public health is a concept that involves everybody. Among other options, COEGI (the Gipuzkoa nursing college) and the UPV/EHU will be offering fundamental views of ethical aspects of the situation we have been passing through.

Governance. The pandemic has also revealed the cracks in our political system; the distance between the public and their authorities, their mistrust; and the flaws and obsolescence in legal structures that have not made the necessary progress either in Europe or in Spain. "Co-governance", a practice that has been called for endlessly, will play a starring role this year.

Gender. Too many years have passed since the suffragette and feminist movements emerged. There have been many slogans, but the problem might be that they have become nothing but slogans. It is a matter of making major mental leaps that do not just end up on the front of a T-shirt but generate proposals that shape realities.

Emakunde's option focuses attention on the steps necessary to arrive at a society in which care for life takes centre stage.

Basque culture: Controversy over the antiquity of the Basques has recently re-emerged strongly. A Summer Course to sound out the echo of the polemic: the Basque language in antiquity. The experience of Mintzola and other Basque creative talents is another topic we will be tackling.

In this relearning process, we are aware that YOU and I think differently, but that YOU  and I, in a relaxed conversation, will also reach different conclusions. We will have shared something and so we will have learned something.

This small motor inspires us to keep up the encounters or Topaguneak. This year there will be six encounters, organised by the governance department of the Gipuzkoa provincial authority, which aim to help these participative methodologies to take root in our minds.

On our 40th anniversary, we want only to respond to what reaches us and to abide by the simple message of “Eman ta zabal zazu” by Iparragirre, which Chillida was astute enough to include in the logo for the UPV/EHU and the Summer Courses themselves.

Preparing and running this rich programme in 2021 is only possible with the collaboration of those responsible for each and every one of the courses and the inestimable aid of our supporters, including the BBVA foundation, the Basque government, the Gipuzkoa provincial authority and Donostia/San Sebastián city council.

Likewise, we would like to highlight the participation by 10,074 people in the difficult 2020 edition. If we are able to present a new edition here and now, it is also thanks to all of them.

Enrolments open today for the 40th edition of the UPV/EHU Summer Courses All the options can be explored on our website, www.uik.eus