March 25th & 26th, 2011, Cape Eleuthera, The Bahamas
The sustainability movement looks to policy, technology, and industry for solutions. While intergovernmental agreements and energy infrastructure are important, a fecund approach to enhance our societal-scale effectiveness at tackling these problems is through investment in education. What organizations are preparing our young people well for this challenge? How do we design the academic work in schools to engage students in solving real-world problems? At the periphery- where change often begins – we are inviting you to gather to witness one such model for education for sustainability in action, and share ideas on expanding the model.
At the heart of the model is a question that David Orr asks in his seminal essay on environmental education: what is education for? At Cape Eleuthera in February 2003 Dr. Orr explained that:
…it strikes me that this place is a good bit about reinventing education. There is something new happening here. It’s happening again at the periphery. And education ought to enable us to get to the periphery so we can see the center more clearly. And there is long precedent for going out into the wilderness and seeing the world in a brand new kind of way…. A school can be a model of what we want to do in the world. It is at a scale small enough to get our mind around, big enough to be significant. It is exciting to see a school define itself, as you have here at The Island School as a catalyst for all kinds of exciting things. What difference does Education make? Most of the research on higher education shows that for the dollars expended, we don’t change much…
We invite you to join part in the change underway in schools everywhere, the change that brings Harvard University to post banners on lampposts stating: “Green is the new Crimson.” The Island School is testing and promulgating educational techniques and ideas:
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Research : student-led, team-based ongoing research tied to local needs and supported bythe university model moving masters students; down to the high school level. The choice of projects is dictated by meeting the needs of the school and the local community.
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Place based curriculum: the locale is the textbook, and critical observation forms the basis of “knowing” and what it means to know and understand.
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Experiential education: students generate knowledge, they are not simply consumers of knowledge. They are crew, not passengers. Innovative approaches to assessment expand student skill and agency through a shared academic journey that has no pre-determined end or known content finding.
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Leadership: scuba and kayaking, research, and living together each demands the exercise of interpersonal skills and handling the real complexity of life in a team, as an implicated, connected whole.
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Teaching fellows: tapping into the vast demand for meaningful careers, along the Teach for America model
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Master Teacher-in-Residence: engaging expertise to train young educators
Featured Attendees and Special Invited Guests
Dr. Jonathan Isham has served as the Luce Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, a social activist, and an entrepreneur. Jon teaches classes in environmental economics, environmental policy, introductory microeconomics, social capital in Vermont, and global climate change. Jon currently serves on the Board of Directors of Brighter Planet, Climate Counts, and St. George's School; the Climate Economics Taskforce for the E3 Network, the Advisory Board of Focus the Nation, Kids vs. Global Warming, and the National Teach-In on Global Warming Solutions.
Dr. David Orr (pictured above) is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics. He is also a James Marsh Professor at large at the University of Vermont. He is the author of five books and 150 articles in scientific journals, social science publications, and popular magazines on education, ecology, and design. He is the recipient of a Bioneers Award (2003), a National Conservation Achievement Award by the National Wildlife Federation, a Lyndhurst Prize awarded by the Lyndhurst Foundation "to recognize the educational, cultural, and charitable activities of particular individuals of exceptional talent, character, and moral vision."
Greg Farrell is the founder and former head of Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, a group supporting a network of 150 schools enacting school culture change in existing schools to support methods of learning that engage students as crew, not passengers. Through teacher trainings, conferences, consulting, and the launch of new charter schools, the principles of experiential education are preparing youth in a diversity of schools across the US.
Murray Fisher is the founder and principal of New York Harbor School, a public school in New York City which relates every aspect of its curriculum to the water. Students at the school visit their outdoor laboratory, New York Harbor, every Tuesday and Thursday. Activities include sampling the water and measuring the water quality of these local bodies of water as well as attending lectures on marine science and river history. Other student activities include learning how to sail and navigate on a medium sized schooner, rowing and the care and feeding of aquatic organisms. After-school programs are also related to the water and include Rowing, Swimming Club, Harbor Science Club and SCUBA Diving Club etc.
Alan Khazei is the founder and CEO of Be the Change, Inc., a Boston, Massachusetts based organization dedicated to building national coalitions of non-profits and citizens to enact legislation on issues such as poverty and education. Previously, Khazei served as CEO of City Year, an AmeriCorps national service program engaging 17- to 24-year-olds in a year of service in one of 19 U.S. cities and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Khazei co-founded City Year with Michael Brown, his friend and roommate at Harvard College and Harvard Law School.
Dr. Frank Moretti is the Professor of Communication & Education, and Executive Director at the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. Frank has 39 years of experience in school-based leadership and is recognized as one of America's leading theorists and practitioners in the use of digital technology in education. He was the Executive Director of the internationally known Dalton Technology Plan. He founded the software company Learn Technologies Interactive. He contributes extensively to national conferences and seminars on technology and education and is the author of many papers and articles on innovation in education, and the role of technology, specifically multimedia, in
Andrew Revkin is a senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University. A prize-winning journalist, online communicator and author, he has spent a quarter of a century covering subjects ranging from the assault on the Amazon to the Asian tsunami, from the troubled relationship of science and politics to climate change at the North Pole. From 1995 through 2009, he covered the environment for The New York Times. In October 2007, Revkin created Dot Earth, a Times blog on climate, development and the environment (nytimes.com/dotearth). Revkin’s most recent book is The North Pole Was Here:Puzzles and Perils at the Top of the World (Kingfisher, 2006), the first account of global and Arctic climate change written for the whole family. It was named both an outstanding science book and social studies book by the Children’s Book Council. Revkin has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, AARP’s magazine, Conde Nast Traveler and many other publications. Revkin has a biology degree from Brown, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia, has taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and the graducate center for environmental policy at Bard College. He has won numerous awards for his work, and was the first science writer to receive one of journalism’s top honors, the John Chancellor Award (2008).
Michelle Rhee is chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools system of Washington, D.C. in the United States. In 1997 she founded The New Teacher Project which in ten years has recruited 10,000 teachers in twenty states. Founded by teachers, The New Teacher Project addresses the growing issues of teacher shortages and teacher quality throughout the country by establishing high-quality alternative route to certification programs to bring new streams of accomplished individuals into hard-to-staff urban schools. Since then, TNTP has worked with more than 200 school districts and become a nationally-recognized authority on new teacher recruitment and hiring.
James (Gus) Speth was a co-founder and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He served as Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President under Jimmy Carter. He was Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, founder of the World Resources Institute, and a senior environmental adviser to President-elect Bill Clinton's transition team. He has led several international development and environmental security task-forces, generating the Partnership for Sustainable Development: A New U.S. Agenda and the Compact for a New World reports. He served for 8 yeras in the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Development Group. In 1999 he became the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, and is now a professor at Vermont Law School.