The 1420 Foundation's New Community Education Initiative
The 1420 Foundation is launching its second "Education for a Sustainable World (ESW)" initiative:
"ESW Community Education Initiative (CEI)."
Like the original "In School" ESW teaching/learning initiative, the CEI community education initiative will focus on experiential, "constructivist" teaching/learning in which new knowledge is learned and applied in "real life" sustainable development projects and contexts. In the CEI projects, the learning venue is the community and projects are designed to integrate learning into important local community and regional development contexts. Community participants come to realize and utilize the power of their learning to initiate real life activities which can better their lives and help achieve sustainable communities. They learn to understand and value not only information itself, but the process of obtaining knowledge. They learn and practice how to assess, integrate, and apply knowledge in the development of sustainable communities that reflect their own contexts, cultures and developmental goals.
In its early stages, 1420 ESW/CEI projects will utilize two concepts as points of meaningful engagement for its teaching/learning participants:
- community/regional sustainable development general assessments as bases to develop community and regional sustainable development goals and agendas, and
- community/regional based uses of fundamental technologies, such as communications and energy, to achieve sustainable development goals and agendas.
A long term goal of the early 1420 ESW/CEI projects will be to create a deep commitment within communities around the world to the importance of education, in both in-school and community venues, as a central instrument for achieving sustainable communities that can be successful participants in a 21st century sustainable world.
The ESW/CEI projects will utilize new communications technologies to enhance participants ability to gather, evaluate, process, contribute to the vast and increasingly storehouse of World Knowledge and to collaborate with others in the achievement of their own sustainable development goals.
More on this new initiative will be presented on this Web Site in the summer of '01.
– see the 1420's other "What's New" Project –
– back to the 1420 Foundation's "Education for a Sustainable World" Home Page –