ECOS is a project that I began out of my desire to accelerate the speed at which education is transformed to include more curriculum involving sustainability and social justice.  It is increasingly clear that we need to educate our students how to create an environmentally and socially just world.  One factor that keeps progress slow in this area is that teachers are busy and finding time to develop new curriculum is time consuming.

 

  The idea of ECOS is to bring together like minded educators in the San Francisco Bay Area so they can share ideas, lessons plans, inspiration, and ultimately create collaborative projects between schools if they so desire. If you want to develop a lesson around your local food shed, for example, why not reach out to an educator in the area who has already developed such a project and is willing to share it with you?  This is why I hope teachers will sign up and create their own page where they can outline the relevant lessons and projects they teach and are willing to share so others can benefit from the hard work already done.  We should not all be inventing our own wheels.

 

We teach our students to collaborate and the World is becoming increasingly collaborative yet we as teachers rarely model collaboration.  In fact many teachers work independent of other educators most of their career.  So one outcome of this project is that teachers and schools can become better models of collaboration. Creating collaborative projects between schools can give students a much better sense of their community as it exists beyond their own school and it will give them a better understanding of how collaboration works.  Imagine schools collaborating on an environmental study and coming together to compare results.  The data collected could in fact be useful to the scientific community.  Or imagine schools working together on a service learning project.  The pride and inspiration the students get from their work would be an incredible factor in forming bonds with students from a school other than their own.

 

The website for ECOS is a tool for connection but we as a group discovered at our first meeting that the face to face interaction is really where the magic happens.  So it is also my hope that we continue to have meetings every few months.  A great idea that came out at our initial meeting was that different schools may choose to host ECOS meetings that have a particular theme and anyone especially interested in that theme can come, learn, share inspiration, and make connections.

 

Ideas that come out at the meetings or online can be discussed in deeper detail using the Forum on the ECOS website.  Interested in finding out what to plant in the school garden that could be harvested before summer vacation - open up a forum and those of us with experience in this area can weigh in.

 

Another key feature of the website is that you can search the site.  So if you are interested in sustainable agriculture you can search the site and find out which members of the network list this as an area of interest or expertise. 

 

Most importantly I want this network to take on a life and direction (or directions) of its own.  I look forward to the organic evolution this collaboration will undergo.

 

because no single one of us is as smart as all of us!