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In This Issue...
- Notes from the Executive Director
- Mini-membership Survey
- Notes from the Board Chair
- Volunteer to Join a Board Committee
- Winter Institute - Announcing 2020 Site
- Submit Proposals for 2019-2020
- Making Registration Smoother in the Future
- Members in Action: School Highlight
- Educational Service Provider Highlight - Find your Path
Job Board Reminder: ISEEN's Career Center is Growing
Job postings in experiential education like outdoor ed, environmental ed, social-emotional wellness, community engagement, science teachers, and student leadership coordinators are just a few samples of the jobs listed right now. Job seekers and employers alike will benefit from the vast ISEEN network of educators.
Summer Institute Cohorts Still Open
There’s still time to register for the 5th Annual ISEEN Classroom Teachers Summer Institutes in Santa Fe, NM. Visit the website for details.
Meet ISEEN at the Following Conferences
Let us know if you’ll be there and hopefully, Shoshanna will have a chance to meet you.
GEBG - Global Education Benchmark Group
Pace Academy, Atlanta, GA
April 4–6, 2019
National Youth Leadership Conference
Washington, DC
April 22–24, 2019
Global Institute
We’re excited to announce that ISEEN will be holding our inaugural Global Institute in partnership with one of our member schools, Chadwick International in Songdo, South Korea, to convene educators across Asia and the Pacific Regions October 8-11, 2020. If your school has programs or connections in the Asia-Pacific region, we'd love you to get involved and connect with you in the planning process. Contact Shoshanna and fill out this brief form to express your interest in learning more.
Members-Only Resources
Explore this page with links to Institute documents, presentations, and past ISEEN Field Notes.
Beyond Borders: Equity and Justice in Experiential Education Resources
For those who wish to delve deeper into the theme of Winter Institute 2019, here are additional diversity, equity and inclusion resources, including the two articles that were sent to all Winter Institute attendees, Windows & Mirrors and The Systemic Birdcage of Sexism. Dwight and Emily have generously offered to work with school communities to support school-wide reflection and change on their equity and justice work on an institutional level. If you are interested, feel free to reach out to them.
Get Bibliohive on Your Phone
One of the coolest ISEEN membership benefits is access to Bibliohive, an annotated article sharing platform. Did you know that you can download the app to your smartphone and log in with your Memberclicks ID? Go to the app store, download it for free, and look for your ISEEN group. Try it today!
Connect with ISEEN Online
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Notes from the Executive Director
By Shoshanna Sumka
The ISEEN Winter Institute was the pinnacle of almost two years of planning, over 40 volunteers from Riverdale Country School and an intentional strategic vision from the ISEEN Board of Directors. As my first Winter Institute (I attended the Summer Institute in 2018), I was nervous, excited, and ready to meet 150 ISEENers from around North America and beyond. For me, the best part was to put faces to names and have conversations with educators doing innovative work at their schools (and the dancing!). Riverdale went above and beyond to generously host us (thanks Dominic Randolph and Beth Pillsbury!) and our theme facilitators, Dwight Vidale and Emily Schorr Lesnick, beautifully led us to examine the intersection of experiential education and equity and justice; looking through windows to other people’s lives and experiences and reflecting on the mirrors of our own identity.
During the Experiential Education in Action Day, I went with a group to visit Weeksville, a free Black Settlement in what is now Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn that was established in 1838 by James Weeks. We visited the Weeksville Heritage Center, saw a film about its establishment in 1971 called “Digging for Black Pride” and went inside cozy homes of African American families from the 1860s. We learned how the redlining federal policies of 1934 kept housing loans, health care, insurance, and even supermarkets out of African American neighborhoods, locking in a history of lack of access to resources and inequality that is still evident today. A truly experiential way to learn history! I returned home exhausted and invigorated to keep working on experiential education through an equity and justice lens. We are analyzing and reflecting on the Winter Institute participant survey results. We hear you and will do our best to continually improve our work. Feel free to reach out to me ([email protected]) any time to chat about ISEEN.
We also celebrated the legacy of founder and former ISEEN Executive Director through announcing the Jessie Barrie Scholarship Fund For Experiential Educators. To honor Jessie Barrie’s passion and commitment to helping educators develop relevant, creative and inspiring curriculum and programming, please consider contributing financially to make ISEEN more accessible. ISEEN is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, so your contributions are tax-deductible.
Mini Membership Survey
We would like to ask you, our members to share your voice through a quick survey- what are we doing well and what could we be doing differently? We are also developing new programming in the form of an ISEEN 2.0 urban institute in July focused on place-placed learning and justice. We want to hear if this is exciting to you.
Notes from the Board Chair
By Vicki Weeks, ISEEN Board Chair
As we anticipate the coming of spring, I would like to look back a couple of months and say a few words about winter:
Every year, I look forward to the Winter Institute with great anticipation and come away supported, inspired, and full of new ideas. This year was no exception. Being in the middle of Times Square in the freezing cold and biting wind added its challenges and also created a certain buzz of excitement. Learning about Riverdale programs and working with the outstanding educators who put in countless hours to ensure a great program filled me with awe. I have wonderful memories of homeroom moments, the all-group dance break, many many conversations over meals, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new people. I look back on a week of action-packed days of enjoyable learning and sharing.
Volunteer to Join a Board Committee
We would love to have more voices on our committees and give members the opportunity to work on ISEEN initiatives and programming. The ISEEN Board welcomes committee-only members to join the following Board committees: Program, Membership, Finance, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Read descriptions of the committees now. Email Board Chair, Vicki Weeks with your questions and interest!
Announcing Winter Institute 2020 Host School: Catlin Gabel School, Portland, OR
We are thrilled that Catlin Gabel School in Portland, OR will be the host of ISEEN’s next Winter Institute on January 21-24, 2020. The theme, “Just Communities: Learning and Leading Through Listening to Each Other” will explore elements of leadership, community, justice and the role independent schools play. Lodging will be at the historic Benson Hotel and activities will highlight the collaborative work of the coalition-led youth empowerment space, The CENTER, of which Catlin Gabel School is a founding partner.
Submit Proposals for 2019-2020
Today, March 11th is the last day to propose a pre/post workshop for Winter Institute 2020, a regional expedition at your school, or to host ISEEN at your school in 2021. Submit your proposal today!
Making Registration Smoother, A Change
To make it easier for you, registration will be changing for 2019-2020 ISEEN programs by making the process more streamlined and help with full academic year planning. Schools will be able to reserve spots for all upcoming Expeditions and Institutes once registration opens in the summer (we’ll be announcing all 2019-2020 programming in late spring before registration opens). Round one is for reservations where you may hold spots for your school without a need for names. The second round is attendee enrollment where specific attendees (with names and personal info) will officially enroll. This enrollment will also be where attendees choose Institute sessions and optional activities. The actual people attending must complete the enrollment by the due date. If they don’t update their registration, they’ll lose their spot and we’ll move to the waitlist.
Members in Action: School Highlight
Shakespearience: “All the World’s a Stage” for Episcopal High School’s English students on their Experiential Learning Curriculum Day, Fall 2018
By Millie McKeachie ([email protected]) English teacher and Associate Director of the Washington Program
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Wednesday afternoons at Episcopal High School, Alexandria, VA are reserved for experiential learning through our Washington Program. While many of our Wednesday program experiences take the students into the DC Metroplex communities beyond our boarding school gates, we also hold several experiences on campus; this past fall, the Washington Program paired with the English department to plan an all-student experiential day connected to the study of Shakespeare (developed with an English teacher who attended the Summer Institute). During Shakespearience’s one-year trial run, we sought to replace the long-standing tradition of the Shakespeare exam by engaging all students of the community in an afternoon of scholarly and experiential work. The Shakespeare exam was a comprehensive assessment that, prior to this fall, had been used to evaluate seniors on all of the Shakespeare texts covered during their time at Episcopal. In the new plan, we aimed to present the students with as rigorous of a Shakespeare challenge, and we hoped to build from the traditional assessment by including elements of the KOLB cycle in each of our English classes.
Educational Service Provider Highlight: Find Your Path Utah
Founded by long-time ISEEN member, Tyler Fonarow, Find Your Path Utah participants engage in a variety of wilderness pursuits - hiking, camping, climbing, paddling, biking - to intentionally develop and practice critical life and interpersonal skills such as awareness, resilience, connectedness, and problem-solving. Find Your Path Educational Services, the school partnership arm of Find Your Path Utah, partners with teachers, administrators, and schools to support program and curriculum development and/or leadership of customized local, regional or national experiential education programming. These services vary greatly and are designed specifically to the needs of the school and its own culture, closely integrate with their curriculum and align with its educational goals.
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