School Workshops
Shifting thinking inside the classroom.
Common Earth offers engaging and interactive workshops that invite teachers to explore ways to improve the educational journeys of their students. Our unique content and approach use a systems lens to encourage curiosity, reexamine mindset, and identify interconnection as essential elements in understanding and responding to the climate emergency.
Benefits
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Students bring and apply knowledge across study areas thereby including the teacher in a co-learning, rotational leadership classroom model.
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Lifelong learning is buoyed by developing conceptual understanding, allowing students to apply Big Ideas to many contexts and disciplines.
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Teachers and students experience expanding curiosity, wonder and interconnection together.
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Teachers and their students get comfortable with making complex connections through a learning process that strives to mitigate unintended consequences while being open to emergent possibilities.
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Students are struggling with mental health, wellbeing, and purpose. When student effort and time are placed in meaningful context through an interconnected view of subjects and disciplines, both inside and outside of the classroom, the pieces fit together and school makes sense. The natural consequence is students/graduates who believe they can make a difference.
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Teachers are reminded of the holistic intention and wisdom contained in the curriculum documents and how to creatively plan and practice with this in mind.
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We look for ways to connect this understanding with frameworks already in place with which your school or board may already be familiar. For example, the
About Professional Development
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Workshops are available to be delivered online or in-person.
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Timing ranges from 1-3 hours depending on school needs.
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The workshops can be combined for a comprehensive experience and be distributed over 3 different days.
Workshops
Our workshops are designed to meet the needs of the school, organization and audience with whom we will be working and attend to three major strands of inquiry: systems, sustainability and purpose.
Systems
The systems strand points to the ubiquity of interconnected systems in our world. Visual and conceptual frameworks help make sense of the micro and macro systems at play in everything around us.
Sustainability
The sustainability strand draws attention to looking for generative, long-term, expansive and inclusive ways to meet human needs in ways that do not deplete our shared home.
Purpose
The purpose strand explores transcending current paradigms of the goals of human activity through prioritizing process over product. The roles of presence and compassion are emphasized in exercising agency towards reimagining our present and future world community.
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Remembering What You Already Know
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Systems - identifying natural and human-created systems and what distinguishes one from the other (intervention, intention to control, limitless growth vs oscillation towards default equilibrium)
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Sustainability - looking to nature’s wisdom can lead us to better planetary and (therefore) human outcomes
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Purpose - there is a default wisdom inherent in us all that allows us to recognize the power of thought and our ability to choose a different story
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The Classroom as Commons
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Systems – identifying systems archetypes particularly The Tragedy of the Commons and turning your classroom into the Triumph of the Commons.
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Sustainability - ensuring climate justice and wellbeing for all communities on Earth rather than the benefit of a few
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Purpose – Agency and collective Freedom
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The Evolutionary Process
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Systems - complexity has been increasing since the creation of the universe with the Big Bang
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Sustainability - interfering with our own and other species natural creative evolutionary process defies Earth’s systems resulting in the lost opportunity for planetary and human adaptation
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Purpose - hope resides in the idea that our human path and its impacts on other creative forms are incomplete, we are a species still in progress (as is everything else)
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Zooming Out (To Zoom In)
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Systems – everything is a system within a system, both macro and micro
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Sustainability – Using the human ability to collect data while also exercising imagination shows us how zooming out allows us to see ‘the story’ playing out over time, and to anticipate unintended consequences of our past and current actions
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Purpose - this information can be used to design and create a better present and future
