Thrivability Education
Our Programs for Schools
Our EARTHwise Thrivability Education program, previously called the Education for Sustainability program, is for people from all generations, and in particular Youth, to learn how to become Custodians for a Thrivable world and future. This includes learning the fundamentals for ecological sustainability, eco-systemic health, climate change mitigation & adaptation, biodiversity protection, eco-systemic governance, ecological food security, zero-waste principles, permaculture and regenerative design principles, social innovation, eco-social entrepreneurship, collective and intuitive intelligence, whole-Self development, peace-building, healing & reconciliation, law and governance for thrivability, creativity and innovation, how to connect and listen to the Spirit of the Land and honour the original Custodians, traditional Wisdoms, Vision development, and learning how to Love each other and our Earth from wholeness & with respect for the Unity in our Diversity.
Thrivability Education empowers by facilitating experientially the teachings, knowledge, principles, and practices such that wisdom, vision and understanding emerges. We trained over 300 teachers and reached more than 20,000 students in Mauritius since 2012. Our educational best practices have become embedded in mainstream education at a national level in Mauritius. Several of the schools that were trained by us have now received their International Eco-School certification. This programme has been fully implemented in Loreto College Curepipe, St Mary’s College Rose-Hill, and BPS Fatima College Goodlands, Mauritius. We have also provided training to Westcoast International Primary school. Our programme is open to all schools and aims to innovate and transform the educational systems through a systemic whole curriculum based approach.
Schools are supported to become Learning Community for thrivability, and curriculum subjects are interwoven through common themes that address the social, economic and environmental dimensions of thrivability. Teachers and students are also trained in Systems Thinking and System Dynamics and learn to work with Causal Loop Diagrams and Behaviour-over-time Graphs to graphically map out the many interwoven issues and complexities that are part of our current sustainability challenges. For more information and further inspiration you can watch the videos from our schools here below, as well as the various articles that share the learning journey of Thrivability Education.
Research Activities & Contributions
Action-based research, documentation, and publication of emerging best practices and lessons learned is part of the core EARTHwise activities. We also contribute to research activities of our partners, and share these resources here and via our social-media channels.
The r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint (BP 9)
Dr. Anneloes Smitsman is the lead author of the r3.0 Educational Transformation Blueprint with 7 Transformative Learning Perspectives for Regeneration and Thrivbability, published by r3.0. This Blueprint features the EARTHwise Education for Sustainability program as case-study, as well as the transformation strategies that have evolved from the EARTHwise research over many years.
The purpose for this Blueprint is to inspire, catalyze, and support a much needed shift in the role and focus of education towards developing our transformative capacities for regeneration and thrivability. Major inner and outer shifts are required in our perspectives, understanding, attitudes, expectations, behaviours, and actions for safeguarding the present and future wellbeing of life on earth. Without this, the survival of our own and many other species is not guaranteed. Never before has learning and education become this important for developing our navigational capacities during this catalytic time of compounding tipping points. This includes preparing humanity for what we have set in motion by destabilizing our climate systems and damaging our biodiversity, and to catalyze the required actions for preventing the worst case scenarios from happening by shifting gears and trajectories now towards regeneration and thrivability.
The Global Education Futures Report – Educational Ecosystems for Societal Transformation
This report features the work of our partner Global Education Futures (GEF), a global initiative dedicated to collaboratively designing, prototyping and evolving educational systems worldwide. Alexander Laszlo is one of the co-authors of this report and Anneloes Smitsman contributed to the report via an interview session with GEF members. The foreword has been written by Peter Senge. This report is a must-read for all who work in education to help transform our societal systems as well as those who work for the transformation of our educational systems.
Through many collective vision building sessions the authors of this report have condensed this global work presented in the following pages as a distributed team of authors, meeting during GEF sessions in Germany, Cyprus, Austria, Argentina, US, and writing from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Arizona, and Colorado, honoring the spirit by which this vision has been co-created; as a living, evolving, and open-source representation of the emerging future of education. The authors of the report are: Pavel Luksha, Joshua Cubista, Alexander Laszlo, Mila Popovich, and Ivan Ninenko.
Thrivability Education Research
The following articles and book chapters provide an overview of the best practices and lessons learned that emerged from our Education for Sustainability Programme from 2012-2018. This research formed part of the Ph.D. case-study research of Dr. Anneloes Smitsman at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute of Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her Doctoral dissertation Into the Heart of Systems Change, includes the interviews that formed part of this research and can be viewed via the playlist here below.
