The purpose of the Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School, or SEEDS, is to develop and offer educational experiences that enhance people’s abilities to knowledgeably and creatively address the interwoven social and ecological crisis of our time. SEEDS seeks to prepare students for roles as agents for positive change in their home communities and as members of a global community.
SEEDS offers weekend courses in Social Ecology, Community Development, Healing the Health Care System, Labor and Globalization, Organic Agriculture and Food Security, Alternative Energy and Eco-technology, and Eco-feminism, as well as shorter workshops and presentations by faculty and guest speakers on Engaged Spirituality, Dismantling Institutional Racism, and Organizing Principles and Strategies, most of which are geared more toward adult learners. Within these programs, students recruited nationally as well as locally will learn and intern intensively and then translate their active learning to the soil of their home communities, as well as within various movements for social and ecological change.
One interesting program is the Greenmapping Program, which is designed to create a visual inventory of natural, cultural, and green living resources on the island of Vashon in Washington State. The program involves creating a product, an attractive and accessible map, and a dynamic process of generating inclusive community awareness and participation toward a sustainable future. Through the Greenmapping Program SEEDS aims to strengthen local-global sustainability networks, to expand the demand for healthier, greener choices, to stimulate and celebrate ecological citizenship, and to help successful initiatives spread to more and more communities. Through this program, students will be learning about the world through their own experiences, and will be making meaning of complex issues through creative means, something that Oakes and Lipton discuss at length (p. 76). By using community members to teach students about their world, SEEDS is building on what students already know about their locality (Vashon Island), to foster an understanding of similar issues around the world, and thereby using what Vygotsky proposed as being a sociocultural learning process (p. 81). I do believe, however, that SEEDS is utilizing what Tabak called the Instructional Multicultural Science Education approach, in that the organizers are using creative means of instruction to enculturate students into a specific understanding – i.e., turning students into miniature scientists and activists (pp. 35-36).
Sources:
Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. (2006). Teaching to change the world. New York: MacGraw Hill.
Tabak, I. (2005). Are disciplinary distinctions pertinent to multicultural education?: A view from science. Multicultural Perspectives, 7 (4), 35-36.
