Transformative
Education
Reframing what success looks like
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it so far.”
David Orr (1994)
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INDIVIDUAL
ENVIRONMENT
COMMUNITY
LITTLE
EARTH
We are challenging the idea of "success" as a goal of education and children's life and we are shifting toward the idea of passion-based transformative education that sees success as a result not a goal.
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Little Earth's educational foundation is at the interconnectedness between human beings, their community, and the environment.
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INDIVIDUAL
Developing resilience and a deep sense of self is essential for young learners to be able to develop their gifts and take their place in the world.
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COMMUNITY
Diverse learning abilities are encouraged and welcome. The world needs all different types of superpowers. Learning at Little Earth is a collaborative effort. Collaboration (vs competition) enables more creative solutions, hence more advancement.
Accountability toward the team and the community at large becomes a motivating learning factor.
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ENVIRONMENT
Children who learn in nature develop a strong sense of self in relation to their environment that they learn to respect and protect, because they realize their livelihood depends on it.
Nothing standard about it
Children are by nature out-of-the-box thinkers, traditional schooling redirects this innate inclination and pushes to homologation through set curricula, standardized tests, and closed-ended learning methods.
The solutions needed for the challenges we are facing require out-of-the-box thinkers, who have developed critical thinking skills to challenge the status quo and create innovation for a sustainable future.
Little Earth supports independent thinking and has a built-in system to facilitate it.
Out of the box
By moving the classes outdoor we have literally removed the box that curbs children's possibilities. In a traditional classroom everything is pre-determined for the child. The cubbies, the trays on each table, the signs on the walls. Children are “free” to experiment WITHIN the boundaries that have been set for them. Their learning experience has been premeditated and lies within those boundaries. At Little Earth, no experience is pre-determined for the children, who have a true opportunity to push the limits of what this experience can be or means to them.
Project-Based
Little Earth education is hands-on project based and passion based. Children are learning by and while doing. Core academics such as English, Math, Science and Social Studies are woven in the project and are put into context.
From farming to regenerative agriculture to foraging to archery to cooking and horsemanship to crafting, knitting, playing and story telling children learn knowledge, values and skills to address interconnected global challenges including climate change, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable use of resources, and inequality.
Addressing current environmental, economic, and social challenges requires a transformation in thinking.
We believe that education plays a pivotal role in fostering transformational thinking.
Little Earth was born with the ambition to provide students the educational framework, missing in traditional education, needed to tackle these challenges.
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We believe that if young people in schools develop an emotional attachment to the natural world to complement their developing intellectual understanding of the vital services nature provides humanity, this bond could result in a natural culture of care for the environment and in motivation to find solutions for present and future environmental and social challenges.
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