SoL Education Partnership Launches National Learning Community
The summer has been anything but slow for the SoL Education Partnership. The first SoL Education Partnership Core Course was held during the week of August 6-10 in Ashland, Massachusetts. The course launched a national learning community of Schools and Communities that Learn for a Sustainable Future. The SoL Education Partnership now has five founding members, including: Woodmere, Long Island; Phoenix, Arizona (via the Murphy School District), Burlington, Vermont (with Shelburne Farms); Ashland, Wisconsin and Morristown, New Jersey. Other sites interested in joining the SoL Ed Partnership -- including Santa Fe, Reno and Memphis -- also attended the core course.
The Core Course is a program of the SoL Education Partnership, a collaboration of the Society for Organizational Learning, The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, and the Creative Learning Exchange. The course was facilitated by Peter Senge, Jaimie Cloud (The Cloud Institute), Linda Booth Sweeney (SoL) and Lees Stuntz (Creative Learning Exchange).
The vision of the national learning community is to create systemic change for a sustainable future by forming strong collaborative relationships within, between, and among schools and communities. Through the core course, participants worked with other stakeholders across the country to deepen and integrate their knowledge and practice of four frameworks: Systems Thinking/System Dynamics, Organizational Learning, Education for Sustainability, and Authentic Youth Engagement.
By working and learning together to understand the important linkages among these four frameworks on the individual, local community, and national learning community levels, participants explored their own role in shaping and sustaining the innovations and best practices that will contribute to a sustainable future.
At the culmination of the course, participants from various sites signed up to co-create, with SoL, a national learning network. Some of the emerging features of this national learning network include: site specific projects, intra- and inter-site development, research and scholarship as well as a central organizing website. A small group is working to develop a “Creative Commons” for the national learning community as well. Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. SoL Ed Partners hope to create and use a creative commons site (similar to a WIKI) to create and share information, tools and resources related to Schools and Communities that Learn for a Sustainable Future.
In addition, each site committed to developing on-going sustainable innovations in their respective communities. Some of these projects will include: developing and offering a national core course for youth, a community project to develop more accessible green spaces, a community engagement project to develop greater trust and good will between the schools and the community and a year-long professional development course for teachers focused on systems thinking and education for sustainability.
For questions related to the SoL Education Partnership, please contact Linda Booth Sweeney at Linda_Booth_Sweeney@post.harvard.edu.
Spinning your performance wheels? Get traction at the SoL Academy!
September 17-21, 2007, Detroit, Michigan
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Download the PDF brochure (includes registration form) or register online
We’re delighted to invite you to the launch of the SoL Academy. Over the next year, we plan to offer a series of regional sessions geared to the needs of local current and potential members. This first series of workshops will be held in Detroit and hosted by DTE Energy, a founding member of SoL.
We have created a schedule for the Academy so that you can come for just one half-day session, or attend as many as seven different modules over the course of the week.
In honor of SoL's 10th anniversary, this event is also SoL’s first real fundraiser. All services and facilities have been contributed to SoL, so except for some minor expenses, all proceeds will go to a capital fund to help insure that SoL continues for the next 10 years and beyond!
If you can’t attend the Academy and are interested in offering one or more of these workshops in your own organization, we can do that too. Contact us for more information.
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