my latest project to 'save the world'

Future generations are going to "save the world". Of course the World itself will not need saving but there are many things on this planet that do need saving or will need saving in the future. So we educators must provide our students with the skills, tools, and understanding they will need as well as a motivation to act as compassionate productive members of a global community. The future generations will get to redesign the way we do nearly everything on this planet and they will need to be ecologically and culturally literate.

I wanted to expand the speed at which education can rise to meet this challenge. In order to ignite change beyond my classroom I started a collaborative network of educators in the San Francisco Bay Area (an beyond perhaps) who are interested in teaching sustainability, social justice, and service learning. Teachers work in isolation from other teachers and developing new curriculum takes loads of time (something teachers don't have a lot of). So I thought if I can create a network among educators who have already developed curriculum they are willing to share it would help speed up the introduction of these topics into schools. Also by modeling better collaboration between schools students will get to know their larger community better and also will be better prepared for the increasingly collaborative world in which they will need to operate.

I began by emailing schools near mine to find interested teachers and we had one very inspiring meeting this winter and have another planned in the spring. Seeing the connections people made at the first meeting and the discussions of possible collaborations between students and teachers from different schools, I got a sense of the power of this project. As a tool for keeping in touch and to provide a platform on which teachers can connect with other educators who have similar interests or have curriculum to share, I created a website (with the help of some high school students) called ECOS - educators collaborating on sustainability, social justice, and service learning. The website was launched last week and you can check it out at: http://ecosnetwork.ning.com/.

If you know any educators who might be interested in joining the network please forward this blog to them.

Happy Spring (into action)