| 2001-02 Destiny: Welcoming the Unknown (Fall only) WS SABBATICAL LEAVE | |
| Summer 2001 |
The Dream coming
through: This summer I can buy the land for The School Without Walls. My first host family in the US have decided to help me buy a piece of farmland in rural Peru. The earthquake in February 28th. made us all think and re-think our lives. I attended several summer institutes, as always the Instructional Technology institute left me thinking of ways to teach Computer Literacy in a more direct way and using Freire's ideas. We also spent time to plan for the Destiny program and how we are going to link it with the Reservation-Based program. |
| Fall 2001 |
Destiny: Welcoming
the Unknown With Kristina Ackley and Gary Peterson. Because of one resignation, Yvonne couldn't be the faculty liaison between the two programs. We communicate very often electronically to coordinate sunday activities and so far it works well. I am learning from Kristina how to make lectures very relevant and concrete. In several ways we are offering a very rich program and students are experiencing a wide range of pedagogical possibilities participating in presentations in both programs. |
| Winter 2002 |
Sabbatical
In Peru: I discussed the project of the School Without Walls with community leaders and did a summer school for teachers and prospective faculty of the School Without Walls. The School, to my surprise, already exists in Guadalupe. SInce 1995, when Evergreen students from the MIT96 program and I started workshops to build community, participant Guadalupanos discovered that the best learning tool in Guadalupe is the dialogue which. interestingly enough, is forbidden in the formal school setting just like it is in the US system. All my friends and I needed to do was to create opportunities for Guadalupanos to have open dialogues about specific topics like What is garbage? and through dialogue learn about it and find solutions or prevent problems. In Peru it was summer time, my family and I moved from the rural town of Guadalupe to a tiny fishing village called La Barranca. There we lived with other 30 families or so. The new community organized many activities for people of all ages, learned to work in groups, uses of solar energy, learned to tie the history and the geography of the place, invented ways to recycle plastic and finally created ways to collect funds to maintain the beach clean specially on sundays when most people from town came to spend the day. This experience gave me the opportunity to finally synthesize my own ideas on teaching and learning. Now I can put my central idea in one sentence: "teaching is more a fantasy than a reality; learning is more real than teaching, Teaching is extremely valuable only when the student is interested" |
| Spring 2002 |
Sabbatical
In the US: my plan to start fund raising to implement School Without Walls was not implemented. A great change has happened in the strategies I intended to use to empower indigenous communities in the Americas. Freire's main lesson takes away from me any attempt to become a liberator, a missionary or a developer. Thanks to my volunteer work in Quipunet, I learned that one of the most important leaders of the Peruvian Amazonia was going to visit Seattle to participate in the Shaping of the Network Society Conference. Mino came to the US to share wth leaders from other world organizations the strategies his Ashaninka community is using to avoid the education for extinction already put in place by Peruvian governments. Yvonne and I invitrf Mino to visit our Reservation Based program and an extraordinary relationship was started. |
| Summer 2002 |
The School Without
Walls Because of my experiences in team teaching with David, Yvonne, Gary and Phil Smith, the natural process to develop the new idea of school had to be experimented here at the college. I suddenly realized that I have been involved in one of the greatest experiments in the history of education. My friends and I did not call it experiment and we do not make a big deal of it because it is happening naturally. Somehow the ingredients came together: an institution of higher learning dedicated to offer an alternative approach to education, students eager to participate in a Freirian environment and faculty who have learned Freire's ideas and who do want to get them to the praxis level. |
| 2002-03 Respect: A Process of Universal Humanity | |
| Fall 2002 |
Respect: A Process
of Universal Humanity With David Rutledge we will put together ideas from: 1)Evergreen five foci on teaching and learning (to really understand what students came looking for and to find out what Evergreen really has to offer them), 2)Freire's pedagogy (to personally find out our own state of oppressed or oppressor), 3)Zinn's history views (to begin to look for how the way we were taught history shaped the way we think), 4)Bloom's Taxonomy (to begin to understand how curriculum, instruction and assessment are tied together and the political use of the education system), 5)the Native American teaching/learning philosophy (to be exposed to other ways to teach and learn, to give credit to oral cultures) and 6)Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory (to look inside of ourselves, to understand our own inclinations and what we value when external oppression is absent. To learn to believe that athletes are also very intelligent people). After five intensive weeks of reading, dialogue, reflection and writing, we know that students will begin to ask their own questions. Many of them start their own journey to use education as a road to freedom; some other students struggle hard trying not to go inside themselves; and very few can't cope with so much responsibility and will leave the program early. |
| Winter 2003 |
Respect: A Process
of Universal Humanity International travel component to practice community work learning. Putting theory to
praxis: Evergreen five foci, Freire's pedagogy, Zinn's history
views, |
| Spring 2003 |
Respect: A Process
of Universal Humanity
Assessing the experiment of putting in praxis: Evergreen five foci, Freire's pedagogy, Zinn's history views, Bloom's Taxonomy, the Native American teaching/learning philosophy and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory. |
| Summer 2003 |
The School Without Walls |
| 2003-04 Learning Spanish by teaching in Peru at The School Without Walls | |
| Fall 2003 |
I was going to do MIT2004 Second Year but there were changes. Now I would like to offer this one year program in Peru |
| Winter 2004 |
|
| Spring 2004 |
| 2002-03 | |||
| - | |||
| 2003-04 | |||
| - | entitled:
Learning Spanish by teaching in Peru at The School Without Walls |
Learning
Spanish by teaching in Peru at The School Without Walls |
Learning
Spanish by teaching in Peru at The School Without Walls |
| 2004-05 | |||
| -The School Without Walls | David, Yvonne and I have offered to teach another Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 | Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 | Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 |
| 2005-06 | |||
| -The School Without Walls | Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 | Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 | Teachers of Native American Learners MIT2006 |