Experiential Learning Workshop in Berlin

Last October, members of the Berlin community gathered for an experiential learning workshop to dream up a vision of a sustainable tourism industry.

This event recap was written by Lisa Hübner Moreno. Lisa is a co-chapter leader at Travel Massive Berlin, a member of the Travel Massive core team and a marketing & PR specialist for the tourism industry.

Envisioning a sustainable travel industry

We gathered at CISpace, a new co-working space and café in up-and-coming Moabit district – many thanks for hosting us!

Community member Veronika Mercks (with help from Lukas Sentner) guided us through a range of exercises using the method of “Social Presencing Theatre” to give the participants an opportunity to perceive the system of traveling and tourism on a deeper level – without words.

First, we uncovered how the system is working currently and explored the relationship between the key players. In the next step, we examined how the system needs to change in order to limit the negative impacts this system has in different ways.

Building a travel school

Finally, the group then split up into two teams to work on the idea of designing a “travel school” to educate stakeholders about sustainable practices that could lead to the industry relationships we envisioned in the earlier part of the workshop.

Ideas ranged from hands-on workshops with government officials at the destination to skill sharing and empowerment sessions with local stakeholders so they could take ownership of their destination and resources.

The workshop closed with everyone writing down one sentence about the role they’d like to play within the system, which left members feel hopeful and inspired.

Below are some more images from the event. Thanks to @bikingboundlessly / ©️Lukas Sentner for providing some of the images.

Thanks, Veronika and Lukas for hosting this inspiring workshop for our community!

Follow Veronika on Travel Massive to learn more about her educational travel project Navigaia Journeys.