Enlivening Sustainability

Integrating Theory, Practice, and Social Responsibility in Teacher Education
September 19-22, 2012

Quillisascut Farm and the Columbia River Watershed Conservation Consortium have created a participatory meeting to discuss bioregional action for education for sustainable development.

You are invited to immerse yourself at farm school and refresh your relationship to Environmental Learning and Education for Sustainable Development through our shared place, the Columbia River Watershed.

A three-day hands-on professional development workshop at Quillisascut Farm™ for college and university faculty and administrators who are developing sustainability curriculum across liberal arts disciplines. Learn how to connect your institution to the ecological and cultural wisdom embodied in your local community and generate a partnership model for sustainability education across our bioregion and watershed.
Participants will:

  • Exchange ideas with fellow faculty working to include education for sustainable development in course curriculum and program development
  • Explore Systems Thinking by reflecting, discussing and participating in the patterns that connect all of life’s operating systems
  • Consider the significance of regional biodiversity, soil food webs, and the socioeconomic food web especially in relation to critical geography
  • Re-imagine our collective place in our watershed, and set “place-based learning” within the real life context of our bioregion
  • Discuss the “Big Ideas” of sustainability, including necessary language shifts and processes to deepen our thinking, action and engagement. Examples are partnership, bioregion, learning capacity, values, collaboration
  • Engage in discussions regarding the importance of sustainable life styles.

Goal: An envisioned outcome is to generate a model of a virtual “platform” where multiple sites throughout the watershed can participate in engaged sustainability actions such as data collection, citizen science, sharing story, and activism (i.e. FieldScope and Columbia River Watershed Atlas projects)

This meeting has been funded with the generous support of the DeVlieg Foundation, Idaho Geo-literacy Outreach and Education (I-GEO), Community Building Foundation, dasein network and …
The purpose of the meeting is to meet with other regional educators and discuss ways that collaborative work can enhance the efforts for education for sustainable development.

$100 participation fee includes course materials, instruction, food and lodging (shared rooms). (transportation not included) . Participants stay on Quillisascut Farm, Rice WA, with bunkhouse-style lodging and meals provided. Limited to 15 participants