Session B 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. (running concurrently with Session A)

Christopher M. Bacon: Participatory Pedagogies for a More Sustainable Food System

The goal of this workshop will be to share teaching methods (especially games and
hands-on activities) that support all learners as we simultaneously understand and
seek to transform our food system.

Christopher M. Bacon is an environmental social scientist and agroecologist. He grew up in rural Maine and Northern California. After studying environmental studies and economics he worked in Washington, DC and joined the Peace Corps. He finished a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies in 2005 and has since taught in the Latin American and Latino Studies, and Sociology Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Chris has spent more than six of the last ten years living and working in Nicaragua. As of September 1st 2008, he will be an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow affiliated with the Geography Department of UC Berkeley. He is an author and co-editor of Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America.

Alia Whitney-Johnson: Emerging Voices, Emerging Vision: Engaging Youth in Global Service

Alia will tell her story of founding Emerge Global while in college. Emerge Global is
a nonprofit that works to develop the economic and personal capacity of girls and
women in Sri Lanka who have survived tremendous abuse. Her presentation will
focus on Emerge as an evolving story of inspiration, tremendous obstacles, and
community development. Moreover, she will talk about how educators, students,
and schools can get involved in Emerge’s evolving mission or can begin their own
service learning programs.

Alia Whitney-Johnson is a senior at MIT, studying environmental engineering with a focus on international development. She has helped refine a process for converting agricultural waste into charcoal for use in Haiti, conducted tsunami relief work in Sri Lanka, worked to develop appropriate technologies in Guatemala, and has been a consultant to the World Bank. She is currently an advisor to Worldwide Mobility, an organization working to ensure access to appropriate wheelchairs in developing countries. Her greatest passion, however, lies in her work with women survivors of abuse in Sri Lanka. After traveling to Sri Lanka in the summer of 2005, she founded Emerge Global, Inc. Emerge Global is currently launching its second project: a community with homes, a school, and a women’s cooperative for a group of deserving young women who are currently being sheltered in the Sri Lankan prison system for protection from abusive family members.

Ethan Danahy: Improving Education Through Engineering: Bringing Engineering Concepts into the K-12 Classroom

Over the last ten years the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach at Tufts
University has worked at “improving education through engineering” via tool and
curriculum development, engineering education research, and community outreach/
professional development. This talk will give an overview of our efforts, highlighting
the difficulties we have overcome and the successes we have had, while providing
concrete examples of engineering educational methodologies and techniques that are
applicable at all age ranges from kindergarten to grade twelve.

Ethan Danahy (SBS ’96) received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science in 2000 and 2002 respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2007, all at Tufts University in Medford, MA. He currently holds the position of Director of Tool Development at the Center for Engineering Educational Outreach within the Tufts University School of Engineering, where he manages tool development projects while researching innovative and interactive techniques for assisting teachers with performing engineering education and communicating robotics concepts to students spanning the K-12 through university age range.

Allan DiBiase: Thor-Dew

The title of this presentation is what my co-writer, Kevin Brungot, and I use as
shorthand in referring to a common ground between Henry David Thoreau (1817-
1862) and John Dewey (1859-1952). We call the link we’ve identified “direct
experience.” You can see Thoreau’s narrative description of his experience at work
best in his Journal. Then there’s a wealth of written artifacts that Thoreau developed
his experience into. But we believe that the foundation of whatever he achieved was
rooted in his being awake to the holism of his direct experience as he had it. Later,
the American philosopher John Dewey celebrated and elaborated on this key feature
common to all human beings even if they don’t have a particular word (like “experience”)
for it. Dewey used direct experience as the platform for elaborating fully
developed notions of morality, education, aesthetics, logic, public life, social psychology,
the history of science and the nature of faith. Both men did different things with
“experience” but they shared a common, grounded appreciation for the qualities of
experience as transacted, given and received. This presentation will lay out some of
the sources of this common ground created by putting Thoreau and Dewey into
intersubjective connection.

Allan DiBiase, Ed.D., teaches courses in the foundations of education and the arts as the philosophy and ethics of education. He is a specialist in the life and work of John Dewey, as well as a professional musician. He has his doctorate from Rutgers University and has special interests in Ethnomusicology, culture-based approaches to learning, and 19th-century foundations of American pragmatism.

Rose Marie Marinace and Ann Saunderson: The Reporters’ Round Table

Ann Saunderson and Rose Marie Marinace put the “modern” into their Modern
World History course with the addition of the Reporters’ Round Table. The Round
Table encourages students to become experts about the culture and politics of a
modern country acting in the world today. Media criticism and analysis is also an
integral part of this year-long assignment.

Rose Marie Marinace has been a teacher at Sant Bani School for 14 years and is certified in Social Studies 5-12. She teaches Study Skills and computer skills in the middle school, and Modern World History, US History, Economics, and Dance in the high school.

Ann Saunderson has been a teacher at Sant Bani School for over twenty years and is the head of the Art Department. Ann has been co-teaching Modern World History for 14 years and teaching the course with Rose Marie for six years. Together they integrate art with politics and history.

Gretchen Draper: Writing About Place

Writers like Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry say that who we are is directly related to
where we are. Stories have settings. Memories link us to specific places. We wonder:
What makes a place special and unique? What happens when we create a bond with a
particular piece of geography? Through writing activities and discussion, we’ll explore
the importance of Place – for ourselves, our students, our communities, our cultures,
our natural world. This workshop will be presented in two sessions: one for
elementary and middle school students and teachers, and one for high school ages
and up. Come prepared to write and share.

Gretchen Draper is a teacher, writer and traveler who has worked in the education field over the past 30 years. She is currently a specialist in assessment for local school districts. She is a teacherconsultant with the Plymouth Writing Project, NH’s site for the National Writing Project. Gretchen’s background includes journalism and anthropology studies. She has published essays, short stories, and poems in literary journals, teacher anthologies, and online. She lives in New Hampton, NH with her husband Barry, a science teacher at the Sant Bani School. Gretchen also taught Kindergarten at SBS in the early 1990s.

Torrey McMillan: Simplifying the Complex: An Introduction to Systems Thinking in the Classroom

Our increasingly fragmented world makes it ever more important to educate students
to be able to conceptualize the complex relationships that link so many current issues.
Systems thinking and analysis offer tools to do this. Learn the basic language and
approach used by systems thinkers and how you can apply them in your classroom.

Torrey McMillan is the Chair of the Sustainability Studies Department at The White Mountain School. She has a BA in Ecology from Princeton University and an MS in Resource Policy and Human Behavior from the University of Michigan, with a focus on the design and implementation of sustainability education programs in secondary school settings. She actively experiments with new curriculum and pedagogy, working to integrate both the theory and practice of sustainability into her courses. Systems thinking has been an important element of her curricular content.