The failure of public education to inspire students more fully has everything to do with our failure to mature our imaginations! We’ve yet to grasp the beauty of our children, nature, and of ourselves as educators.
Were we to grasp these beauties that are given to us, we’d naturally bend our hearts, minds, and backs to enjoy our responsibilities to weave these assets into our lessons.
However, if we remain willing to keep bumping into the gray corners of institutional hallways, we cannot hope to awaken our children to their heart-born and earth-bright heritage of sunrises, blue skies, and dancing, snow fed streams.
TEACHING FOR VOICE & CHOICE
Infants stir us profoundly.
As they grow, we tender their sensitivity,
nourish their innocent, loving, and curious emergence.
Among the basic human drives that soon appear are
love for intimacy, voice, choice, and movement.
Along with these we see drives for autonomy,
play, initiative, importance, laughter, and relationships with peers and beautiful, curious “things”.
Yet, no matter how hard we try, and God knows we try,
the cultures of our classrooms rarely nourish the love, freedom,
playfulness, connection (belonging), and curiosity that gives the developing student the experiences that foster character, intimacy, and intelligence.
Can we with our 21st century knowledge and technology change this?
At Heart Bright Learning (HBL) the answer is YES!
How? By focusing on inspiration and connection as we develop meaningful academic skills. Novelty, Beauty and Belonging inspire wonder, curiosity, work, and identity. These feelings motivate inquiry in the arts and sciences
Our beautiful purpose at HBL is to create an inspiring STEAM and SEL Curriculum by creating inspired learning communities devoted to curriculum design that focus on the beauty of human and natural design.
Our challenge as educators is to move from narrowly focused academics to a delighting quest and pilgrimage for greater awareness and meaning.
This is the work of Curriculum Artists—people who thrive exploring the beauty of ideas as they relate to human development.
Many teachers are Curriculum Artists, as are many people in our communities who may or may not work directly with students.
Our website is co-designed by and for Curriculum Artists so we can inspire students, teachers, administrators and, of course, each other.
Research tells us that on-fire hands, hearts and minds learn to work at love and to love work.
Let’s build learning experiences that kindle fires that are lighthouses for lifetimes of learning!
Please search here for beautiful learning experiences that will profoundly engage students and then consider how you might improve them.
Help us build a curriculum that continuously adapts to and nourishes students and teachers.
More about our mission, collaborative process, products, and how you can belong, contribute, publish, and earn money in future Blogs as we add continuous improvement through community design functions to our website.