Tag: Jamie P. Cloud


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education: Partnering Schools With Their Communities

7
November


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the final post of a three article series that provides Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

The Cloud Institute offers several services, including long-term consulting, curriculum design and development, and Education for Sustainability workshops. Which offering is the most popular and which have you seen result in the most significant change for clients?

The most whole system work we do is with school districts and their communities learning together for a sustainable future.  We call those our Sites Learn initiatives. Examples include the nine sites around the country that are members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) Education Partnership that Peter Senge and I created with a team of colleagues, and also our New Jersey Learns program which is funded by The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and is made up of a growing number of sites around New Jersey that participate in Sustainable Jersey.

The next level on the continuum is our Districts Learn work. We work with individual districts and consortia of districts to Educate for Sustainability. The best example of that is our work with seventeen districts through the Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES on a massive and multifaceted EfS initiative that is grounded in a core set of web-based exemplary units of study across all grade levels and disciplines (www.pnwboces.org/efs). Next, we work with individual schools (Schools Learn) from PS 208 in Harlem to the Denver Green School, and from Trevor Day School in NYC to Marin Country Day School in Corte Madera, California, to name a few.

Having said all of that, indeed a big part of the work we do involves professional development and coaching of teachers, leadership development and organizational learning consulting and planning with administrators, and work with educators to embed EfS into the core curriculum. Most K-12 schools are new to EfS. A small minority have been working on it since the early 1990s.

We usually begin a relationship with a school or district by providing an introduction to sustainability and education for sustainability in order to achieve three outcomes: 1) A shared understanding among the stakeholders of sustainability and EfS; 2) A personal rationale for educating for sustainability, and; 3) Participants will become inspired and hopeful about contributing to sustainability through education. All the educators that I have ever met without exception want what is good for kids. It is a deep and fundamental aspiration to contribute to the health and well-being of our children and of future generations. It is a lot of work—especially in the beginning—but it is worth it.  Our children are worth it.

 

What is the most important actionable item you would like readers to take away?

Schools and communities must learn together for a sustainable future.   Demand a  whole systems approach to Education for Sustainability in your schools and community.

EfS is designed to solve more than one problem at a time and to minimize the creation of new problems.  We know that when schools employ this approach over time in partnership with their communities, and implement  EfS in the day to day actions of school community members and explicit instruction,  EfS improves student achievement, increases civic engagement, increases young people’s sense of efficacy,  and improves children’s health and other sustainable community indicators including air quality, waste reduction and energy conservation.  Without children and young people engaged in, and contributing to community initiatives, sustainable communities cannot exist.

Contribute to sustainability through collaborative initiatives that are developed through school and community partnerships.  Education for sustainability is a whole systems approach to education.  Lasting transformation in education requires innovation at the curricular, institutional, and community levels.  By linking schools and communities, kids and adults are thinking differently, learning and working together—all for the future we want.

 A healthy and sustainable future is possible.  Call us.  We will help you educate for it.


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The Cloud Institute for Sustainability: Educating for Sustainability with K – 12 Students

21
September


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the second of three posts that provide Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

Can you please explain the distinction between educating about sustainability and educating for sustainability?

What people don’t always realize is that educating for sustainability is not always about sustainability. It is first and foremost about developing the knowledge and the ways of thinking that will help us to thrive over time.

It is clear that people educating for sustainability do not all have a shared vocabulary with shared meanings.

The Cloud Institute’s framework for Education for Sustainability is designed to contribute to our individual and collective potential and that of the living systems upon which our lives depend.

When we educate about sustainability we treat sustainability as a topic. In my opinion, its use strictly as a topic is limiting and does not allow for what I believe is its highest and best use. To us, sustainability and regeneration are the names for the desired condition we are educating for. I think the greatest value to us is that the concepts of sustainability and regeneration are aspirational and measurable destinations.

Why have you chosen to focus your efforts on K – 12?

The Cloud Institute believes that a sustainable community agenda is unsustainable if it doesn’t formally involve all the children, young people and their teachers. We unite schools and communities to learn and change together  to instigate, sustain, and scale up the innovations and best practices that contribute to sustainability and that characterize Education for Sustainability. We can accelerate the shift toward Sustainability by engaging the schools in Education for Sustainability and securing the role of children and young people as participants, innovators and leaders. We believe that K-12 education can substantially influence knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors related to sustainability. This is the most fertile ground for helping to shape a society committed to sustainable development.

In the most serious conversations about sustainability, I have not detected a shared understanding of the role of education, particularly K-12, in contributing to the shift toward a sustainable future. I have spoken to system dynamics modelers who assume that the time horizon for the return on an investment in K-12 education is twenty years. When I hear that, I ask them, “Do you know any children?!” In my experience, it takes children and young people very little time (especially compared to adults) to turn what they’ve learned into action at the local level.  On average, they are much more responsive, creative, and quicker to make change than we adults are.

Many people have given up on public schools and yet we keep sending the majority of our children there. It is a bad scenario. We can either give up on them and create something else instead, or we can transform them into learning organizations that contribute to our children’s individual and collective potential and that of the living systems upon which our lives depend  (we actually like a bit of both.) We cannot, I would argue, continue to send the majority of our nation’s children to places for thirteen years of their lives that we have abandoned financially, psychologically and emotionally.  That’s just a disaster. That’s part of the problem. I’ll say that upfront.

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Sustainability Education at The Cloud Institute: A Different Way of Thinking

13
September


The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education is a New York City based non-profit founded by Jamie P. Cloud in 1995. The Institute has developed a holistic educational philosophy that involves the individual student along with his or her classroom, school, and community. Known as Education for Sustainability (EfS), this learner-centered method works with the primary influences in the lives of students, knowing that true, long-term change is most easily attained when nearly all major influences support the new vision.

This is the first of three posts that provide Jamie’s answers to several questions I recently posed to her regarding sustainability education.

When and how were you inspired to develop “a different way of thinking”?

[JPC] – I was in one of the first experiments in global education from the 6th-12th grades.  As a result, my work began at the age of 11.  I grew up in Evanston, Illinois.  Our teachers were influenced by Buckminster Fuller and other luminaries of the time. The gist of the experiment was to prepare us to thrive in the 21st Century, to become agents of change and inventors of the future we want.  They provided us  with learner-centered, constructivist methodologies  that produced reflective, flexible and creative questioners, systems thinkers, lateral thinkers, media literate, self-regulated learners prepared to deal with rapid change, increasing complexity and interdependence, uncertainty, diversity, and global challenges, including the environment, peace and security, human rights and human development.

In middle school, I could not have predicted that I would be a founder of the field of Education for Sustainability.  The term sustainability and sustainable development, as we understand it today, would not be coined until 1987, nineteen years later, and the field of Education for Sustainability would not be born until 1992 in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21—some 24 years later.

I grew up to become a Global Educator because that’s what I knew.  In 1987, when the word sustainability appeared in a U.N. report, Our Common Future, I thought to myself, “That’s the name for the desired condition I want to educate for.” I had been tracking the state of the planet data since 1968—since I was 11.  Now I had a word to describe what I saw:  The situation was un-sustainable for humans and other species of plants and animals with which we share the planet.  Sustain-able seemed like a better idea.  Once I had the word, I had the concept. Once I had the concept, I knew I needed to educate for sustainability.

Shortly thereafter, I came across an Einstein quote that we use daily: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that we used to create them. “

 

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