Abstract Forest education is confronted with the challenge of modernizing teaching approaches and methods, particularly so in light of changing employment and societal needs. Many innovative teaching methods are developed by multiple instructors and can be found at the local scales. They have a great and largely untapped potential for being recognized, further developed, and up-scaled. In order to facilitate this social innovation process, a global competition on the best teaching practices in forest education was conducted. The competition attracted 71 applications from 23 countries addressing primary to tertiary education levels. A selection process, which was based on pedagogical criteria, innovation, and demonstrable results, yielded ten short-listed finalists, and ultimately two winners. In this article we provide insights into the teaching innovations of those finalists, with special emphasis on the following two winners: “FOREST 101” programme, Korean Forest Welfare Institute, from the Republic of Korea, focused on stimulating the interests and creativity of vulnerable teenagers through forest-related activities. The other winner was “The Asia Pacific Forest Education Coordination Mechanism (AP-FECM)”, a tertiary level initiative, which featured among others, a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on sustainable forest management, and increasing access to e-learning to a wider audience. Both initiatives demonstrated commitment to developing strong pedagogical practices and networking beyond their frontiers through collaborations among institutions and individuals. The results of the best practices competition and this article can be useful to inform and inspire teachers and education policy-makers in other localities about different ways of teaching forest-related subjects, developing a community of innovative teaching practice, and exchanging teaching methods globally.

中文翻译：

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森林教育的创新：来自全球竞争最佳实践的见解

摘要 森林教育面临着教学方法和方法现代化的挑战，特别是在就业和社会需求不断变化的情况下。许多创新的教学方法是由多名教师开发的，可以在当地范围内找到。它们具有被认可、进一步开发和扩大规模的巨大潜力，而且在很大程度上尚未开发。为了促进这一社会创新进程，开展了一场关于森林教育最佳教学实践的全球竞赛。比赛吸引了来自 23 个国家的 71 份申请，涉及小学到高等教育水平。一个基于教学标准、创新和可证明的结果的选择过程产生了十名入围决赛选手，最终两名获胜者。在这篇文章中，我们将深入了解这些决赛选手的教学创新，特别强调以下两位获奖者：“FOREST 101”计划，韩国森林福利研究所，来自韩国，专注于激发弱势青少年的兴趣和创造力通过与森林有关的活动。另一位获奖者是“亚太森林教育协调机制（AP-FECM）”，这是一项高等教育倡议，其中包括一系列关于可持续森林管理的大规模开放在线课程（MOOC），以及增加对电子向更广泛的受众学习。这两项举措都表明致力于通过机构和个人之间的合作，发展强大的教学实践和超越其边界的网络。