What We Do: Education
While Child Honouring applies to the entire human and global ecology, it stresses the primacy of early learning as the foundation for all that follows. Increasingly, research shows that tending the early years well is the most productive investment societies can make.
The Centre’s education programs are planned to help educators and others who work on behalf of children to enhance and extend their existing Child Honouring practices.
EDUCATION FRAMEWORK
The Centre will assemble a panel of leading national and international education professionals and systems thinkers in order to develop an overall framework around teaching and learning that will eventually apply the Child Honouring lens to primary, middle and secondary schools.
The framework will be based on the Covenant for Honouring Children and its nine Principles – Respectful Love, Diversity, Caring Community, Conscious Parenting, Emotional Intelligence, Nonviolence, Safe Environments, Sustainability, and Ethical Commerce. It will recognize the primacy of early childhood development as the basis of societal health and well-being, and will reflect children’s irreducible needs.
This will be a unique educational document – a framework for teaching and learning based on a single but comprehensive, overarching idea.
The framework will reflect the fact that Child Honouring is a universal ethic and a “code of sustainable conduct” that has implications for every facet of both the school curriculum and children’s lives generally. It is a systems approach to education, different from most approaches to curriculum which tend to focus on specific areas of learning and study.
While not a curriculum document itself, the framework will help educators add to existing resources, and create their own child-honouring classrooms based on the concept that Child Honouring is “the children-first way of sustainability.”
The framework is expected to begin as a living, web-based document. The people developing the framework will reach out to teachers, parents and all community members interested in both children and the well-being of society.
CHILD HONOURING TRAINING
Following the development of a Child Honouring framework, the Centre will train up to 100 consultants a year to introduce the framework to other educators, administrators and parents. These consultants will make presentations in schools, at professional development workshops, to parent-teacher associations, and to community groups, businesses and other organizations.
Consultants will be able to present Child Honouring as a holistic perspective on child development, and also as a philosophy whose principles can enhance every area of a child’s life. They will also be able to assist teachers and parents as they continue to incorporate Child Honouring into their classrooms and home activities.
Weekend workshops will be held once a month throughout the year on Salt Spring Island and will accommodate groups of up to 10 participants per session. The program will begin with teachers, administrators and representatives of teacher-parent associations from British Columbia schools. It will then be adapted and expanded to include teachers and parents from across Canada and the US, and eventually from around the world.
Training will be planned and delivered by educational professionals, some of whom helped develop the education framework. The training content will be adapted as necessary to the specific educational needs of participants.
The training program will include the following topics:
- Introduction to Child Honouring: An overview of the development and principles of Child Honouring.
- Primacy of Early Years: A discussion regarding the evidence-based research on the connections between early development and cognitive, social and emotional competence throughout life.
- Child Honouring and Education: Techniques and practices for applying Child Honouring in the home and classroom.
SUMMER INTENSIVES FOR EDUCATORS
The Centre will provide intensive one-week Child Honouring learning experiences on Salt Spring Island for up to 10 teachers and administrators at a time. Implemented by trainers from the Child Honouring Training Program and specialists from education and other sectors, this program will involve teachers from primary, middle and secondary schools.
Participants selected for these intensives will already be working with Child Honouring and its principles in their schools and classrooms. This program will be designed to provide opportunities for further learning, along with time to interact with both leaders and peers.
Much of the work of the Intensives will take place at schools on Salt Spring Island, and will include opportunities for both professional and personal development. As part of their work, participants will design both curriculum materials for educators and classroom activities for students.
 Comments |
|
Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2
|
|||||||||||
