http://www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-curriculum.html

Take a look at our curriculum samples by grade here:

http://www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-sample.html

How did this happen so fast?

“I went to public school in Georgia until fourth grade,” says Pyron, “but I didn’t find it very engaging.” His mother decided to home-school him for two years, after which Pyron took the ACT and scored well enough to enter Georgia’s Piedmont College at the age of 12, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology at 16.
Looking at prospective graduate schools, Pyron contacted Professor Frank Burbrink of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Biology, whose lab is based at the College of Staten Island and whose research focuses on the phylogenetics of snakes, reptiles, and amphibians.

Burbrink’s lab was a perfect fit. “I was extremely excited to be accepted at CUNY, as I knew that was where I really wanted to do my graduate work,” Pyron says. So a 17-year-old from rural Georgia headed to New York City to study his passion, snakes.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I wanted to work with snakes,” he says.

In research for his thesis, Systematics and Historical Biogeography of the Lampropeltinine Snakes, Pyron found that the biodiversity of these types of snakes is greater in temperate North America than in the tropics—the opposite of which is true for most animals. He has also studied the evolutionary patterns of non-venomous snakes that mimic venomous snakes.

Next January, Pyron will become the Robert F. Griggs Assistant Professor of Biology at George Washington University, which runs a graduate program in his field of systematics and evolution jointly with the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. There, he will be on the fast track to becoming one of the nation’s leading herpetologists, and perhaps the youngest.

Original Source: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/press_information/current_releases/2010/May/commencement.htm

For more information contact David Manning at dmanning@gc.cuny.edu

We are talking about two completely different paradigms: One, the traditional one that is failing, assumes that children are naturally lazy and need to be forced to learn. If you believe that then you need competition for grades, passing and failing, tons of homework, long school days, long school years, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

But modern brain research doesn’t confirm that assumption. Rather, it confirms a second paradigm, that children are natural learners, that the brain is naturally inquisitive. If you operate on that paradigm, as many progressive educators and homeschoolers do, almost none of the approaches mentioned above should be used. The teacher’s role is to actively help the student find resources to explore and learn about everything they are interested in.

In fact, forcing students to be in traditional schools operating on the first assumption creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: After about six or seven years of forcing students to learn things that they aren’t interested in and are often irrelevant to their lives, they do appear to lose interest in learning. That natural ability to learn is gradually extinguished. Anyone who has ever administered standardized tests to that group can see clearly that the rate of improvement on the whole decreases to a crawl, even on those flawed standardized tests. But beyond that, you see the light go out of their eyes. They retreat to watching television and playing video games. Even worse, they retreat to drugs, or in some notorious cases, decide to try to kill people in their schools or themselves.

The latter cases may be rare, but they do reflect that culturally we simply accept as fact that children hate school. Why do we accept that? If children are natural learners and they say they hate school, something is wrong with their school. Something is wrong with many, many schools.

There are schools that children love, and love to go to. These are under the general heading of alternative and progressive. They are learner-centered in their approach. I know of one democratic school in which the children voted to ban all snow days. They didn’t want to miss anything.

Did you wonder why the government never gives statistics comparing home-educated children to publicly educated ones? In many states homeschoolers are required to take standardized tests. The answer might be because in at least one study homeschooled students scored in the 86th percentile nationally.

We need to end No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Education is not a race. Nobody tests you in order to allow you to leave the public library. You are assumed to be a natural learner. All people are. All children are. We need to understand the new educational paradigm before it is too late.

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Feel free to forward, reproduce, or send to your local newspapers as an op-ed.  Please attribute the following information along with it:

Jerry Mintz

Executive Director, Alternative Education Resource Organization

jerryAERO@aol.com

www.educationrevolution.org

(516) 621-2195

Ojai, CA April 20, 2010 — In celebration of Earth Day (April 22), Global Village School, a leader in distance learning through homeschooling, is proud to announce its new K-8 Whole Child, Healthy Planet curriculum. This innovative approach in education features a learning styles-centered program, focusing on engaging the whole child with an emphasis on diversity and developmental stages.

The school’s new K-8 curriculum guides are centered on the four core principles of the Earth Charter: (1) Respect and Care for the Community of Life (2) Ecological Integrity (3) Social & Economic Justice (4) Democracy, Nonviolence, Peace and Diversity.

Families of children attending Global Village School are already enthusiastic about the new curriculum. Parent Beth Campbell-Rafdal says, “We received our Whole Child, Healthy Planet curriculum guide last week. We are so excited that we found Global Village School. I feel as though the curriculum was written for our family! Thank you for helping us navigate an even more meaningful path of homeschooling with our kids.”

While most standard curriculum is shaped by a textbook and a workbook, the Whole Child, Healthy Planet curriculum is built around the inspiration found in many types of literature.
Sally Carless, founder and Executive Director of Global Village School explains, “The K8 curriculum guides cover all of the core academic subjects in a way that engages students through a sense of enchantment, awe, and wonder as well as through the incorporation of art, music, nature, imagination, and story.”

“Global Village is truly a school with heart,” says Marriage, Family and Child Counselor Nancy Hart, M.A.. “How can a child truly learn when his or her focus is the fear around test taking and memorization? If the strongest emotion around schooling is fear, then that fear gets connected to the learning process. Promoting the love of learning, not the fear of failing to learn–wow! What a concept! Isn’t this what we want for our children?”

About Global Village School -
From its base in the coastal hills of Southern California, this successful distance learning school reaches out to students as far away as Arkansas, Argentina and Australia. The school offers an international K-12 homeschool diploma program that empowers students to cultivate their gifts and passions by engaging them in a creative, flexible educational process grounded in the principles of peace, justice, diversity, and sustainability.

The K8 Whole Child, Healthy Planet curriculum is currently being used by private and charter schools as well as by homeschoolers.  To explore samples of the K8 courses, visit www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-curriculum.html.

Media Contact: Michaella Seveney
Phone/Fax: 805-646-9792
P.O. Box 480 Ojai, CA 93024
E-mail: info@globalvillageschool.org
http://www.GlobalVillageSchool.org

Global Village School (GVS) and Secular Humanists share similar values and principles:

At GVS we are interested in peace, compassion, justice, sustainability, community, integrity, appreciation of diversity, caring for the Earth and our fellow beings, creativity, and living an authentic and meaningful life. We offer secular curriculum that encourages the development of thoughtful human beings, and when we explore religion we do it in a non-dogmatic way.

Like Secular Humanists, we encourage critical thinking and value intellect and science. Our curriculum encourages an appreciation of open, pluralistic societies while offering service learning opportunities where students can learn and do something about injustice.

To learn more about our secular homeschooling approach:

Please take your time and explore our site. Feel free to contact us with any questions or ideas that may come to mind. We look forward to partnering with you as we continue in our mission of educating for a better world, one person at a time.

Founded in 1999, the creation of Global Village School was fueled by deep concerns about violence, discrimination, and the state of the planet, along with a compelling vision of a better world. We are an international K-12 homeschool diploma program that empowers students to cultivate their gifts and passions by engaging them in a creative, flexible education process grounded in the principles of peace, justice, diversity, and sustainability. We partner with schools, groups, and individual families to provide the kind of education that prepares students to be wise and capable stewards of the planet and each other.

UU families are welcome to enroll their children in Global Village School. Global Village will be the official “school of record,” maintaining student files, providing written evaluations, issuing official transcripts, and providing diplomas upon graduation. We will provide curriculum (regular or customized) and individualized teacher support. Families can also choose to purchase curriculum only, or to work with Global Village teachers on selected courses. Other families may wish to have us develop a customized curriculum for them, and then work with it on their own. Families can also use our learning styles profile, whether or not they wish to enroll.

Global Village School (GVS) and Unitarian Universalists share the same values and principles:

Our values include peace, compassion, justice, sustainability, community, integrity, appreciation of diversity, caring for the Earth and our fellow beings, creativity, and living an authentic and meaningful life.

Like UU’s, we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we have deep respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part, and we have the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. We believe that each person must be free to search for what is true and right in life.

It is from these values and beliefs that Global Village courses such as Planetary Stewardship, Literature of Diversity, The History of Civil Rights in the U.S., International Human Rights, and Reflections on Peacemaking have emerged.

To learn more about UU compatible education and curriculum at Global Village School, check out our website!

The drive to Sally Carless’ house is indicative of her nature. The road is a small, private road with huge boulders and wild sage lining its edges. Massive oak trees suspend their limbs above the road, adding a green canopy of vegetation, and breaking up the sunlight with patches of shade. You cross a creek over a small bridge, up a little hill and then back down. There, at the edge of the Los Padres National Forest, with avocado orchards to one side, sits a small older ranch house. Here, surrounded by natural serenity, is where you can find Sally Carless, founder and visionary of Global Village School.

Global Village School is a nonprofit distance-learning school founded in 1999 designed to teach tolerance, practical social activism, peace and an understanding for those of different religions, races, physical disabilities, ethnicities and sexual orientations. Global Village School offers customized K-12 curriculum and a high school diploma program. The School’s mission is to teach children how to become proactive in their own lives for social change and social awareness, while at the same time providing a safe haven for students who are harassed or ostracized in the average school environment. The ultimate goal is to provide a place where everyone “belongs,” and develops a sense of individual self-worth sufficient to produce a conscientious, proactive world citizen.

As one approaches the small ranch house that Sally calls home, it is difficult to ignore the beauty and the peacefulness with which she has surrounded herself. Sally sits at a small table underneath a huge oak tree, her dog by her side. She is unpretentious, dressed in jeans and tennis shoes. She has a gentle, quiet nature and a passionate love of the earth and its inhabitants.

Sally Carless holds a Masters’ Degree in Education, curriculum and instruction, with studies in alternative and experiential education and counseling. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in wilderness recreation, with an emphasis in environmental studies. In addition, she is a California credentialed teacher and has done graduate study in the field of counseling and depth psychology, and she has done extensive training with Jean Houston (Human Capacities Training Program) and Barbara Meister Vitale (Practical Applications of Brain Research).

Ms. Carless is also the founder and former co-director of Ila Wii Chala Summer School, in Redding, California, and has been a director for the American Indian Education Programs, Marysville, California. Sally has been active in curriculum development, teaching, personnel management, experiential and alternative education, and she has been teaching for twenty years. Sally is a true believer in lifelong learning and continues to attend many conferences, seminars and training sessions.

Sally Carless’ peace and diversity school has only been with us for a couple of years (editor’s note:  this was in 2002). But you need do no more than turn on the nightly news to know how urgently this kind of education is needed – globally. Currently the school has only United States students, but the inquiries from around the globe are coming in, and Global Village is in the process of signing up its first student from the Czech Republic.

So what brought on this desire to teach about peace and diversity? And what words of wisdom can Ms. Carless offer on the teaching of tolerance and peace? Ms. Carless has the following to say:

“You can find peace education on the Internet. You can find multicultural education. But they are not generally linked together. The problems, however, have the very same roots – fear, lack of understanding and lack of exposure to those who are different. So that’s how the vision for Global Village came about: minority education grew into multicultural education and into diversity education, and so on, until it became peace and tolerance education.

“Peace and understanding can only come about with personal responsibility and awareness. Our society and many religions teach people to be followers. But in order to build a world with responsible, aware citizens, we must teach our children to think for themselves. And that is where our education comes in. Global Village’s courses provide students with the missing links. Such as, how are human rights and the global economy interrelated? How does it impact a child laborer in Asia when I buy a pair of tennis shoes? What is the true cost of that tennis shoe – not just in dollars, but human suffering? What is the true cost of the electricity I use in my home, of the gas I burn in my automobile?”

Sally saw a need to respect all students. “The advent of schools for minorities was a good starting point. But now we need to take the next step. Because in a minority school, what you have is a group of kids, who, even though they now feel safe within their own group, they still don’t know anything about the other groups. What they learn is still ‘us’ and ‘them.’ And the division is maintained. Global Village is attempting to integrate the minorities and the mainstream, the domestic and the foreign, to produce a microcosm of the real world and to teach all of these students the value of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect and social activism.”

Another way in which Global Village addresses personal responsibility and awareness is to introduce students to service learning. The student volunteers to work on a project that improves their community, improves the environment, etc. Generally, the student works with existing advocacy groups like The Humane Society, The La Leche League, Get Out the Vote, or some other special interest group that is helping to improve the world. The student ultimately reports on this project and they are given credits for their “hands-on” learning experience. By volunteering their own time and energy for a project of this nature, the student learns about real world dilemmas and real world solutions firsthand. They use their independent thinking skills and their sense of personal responsibility and awareness to affect the project on which they are working. They learn to be responsible, proactive world citizens. Each child will gain from this experience in their own unique way, but they will all learn that one person can and does make a difference.

Sally continues with her thoughts on teaching peace. “How we are personally affects the whole. If you are peaceful, you have an impact on the world around you. If you are not peaceful, you also have an impact on the world around you. If you are attending a peace demonstration and you act violently or aggressively, you are not truly working for peace. If you work for peace, but don’t want your children associating with that gay couple across the street, then you are not truly working for peace. If we are not peaceful as individuals, how can we have peace in the world? If we cannot individually show restraint in the face of perceived wrongs, how can we expect nations with nuclear weapons to show restraint?”

The vision behind Global Village School is that peace, tolerance and understanding can and must be taught in this ever-shrinking world. “Children don’t start out noticing differences in race. They learn it,” Sally concludes. Children are highly malleable. If a child is taught that they must kill the ‘heathens,’ ‘sinners,’ ‘barbarians,’ he will live that teaching. If, however, a child is taught that we should value our diversity, he will live that teaching. And if a child is taught to think for himself, he will live that teaching as well, and decide for himself. “What we’re talking about here is a higher level of being, a higher level of decision making.”

“Throughout history people have dehumanized the ‘other.’ It was easier to justify slavery, or the stealing of indigenous lands or the murder of people of a different culture or religion or race, if you could convince people that they were ‘less than human,’ that they were ‘savages’ or ‘heathens.’ But the world is much too small now. In the past, people on one side of the world could fight a war and people on the other side didn’t even know about it. Now, not only do we know it instantly, but we are tangibly affected by it. The economy is affected; the environment is affected; our souls are affected. Instability in one area of the world now threatens the stability of all the other areas of the world.”

As the sun begins to sink in the west, a cool breeze drops oak leaves on Sally’s outdoor table. A pink sky paints the whole area with a reddish hue. There is a profound silence as we both contemplate the complex subject that has occupied our afternoon– and much of Sally’s life. An oak leaf lands in my hair, as dozens more dance dizzyingly to the ground. Like the great oak tree that sheds one leaf at a time, we must plant the seeds of peace on earth, one child at a time.

Check out how our website looked during this time period here:  http://web.archive.org/web/20020722010001/http://www.globalvillageschool.org/

Author, Marsha Chandler. Source: http://www.newhorizons.org/strategies/multicultural/chandler.htm

Each grade level contains core resources plus many extras – most likely much more than you will be able to get through in a year. Each curriculum guide includes:

1) A detailed list of books and resources for the year, along with information on where to get them;

2) A study guide with planning templates, and sample activities;

3) General information on the Global Village Whole Child Healthy Planet Method, including articles and coaching tips for parents about homeschooling in general, making the most of the program materials, assessment, etc.; and

4) Many useful and fun extras including a supplemental reading list.

Grades 5-8 are approximately 100 pages in length; Grades K-3 are 70-80 pages. Grades 5-8 have monthly recommendations on how to schedule the various materials and activities into 9 month-long units. Since there are so many different ways the resources for the younger grades can be utilized, Grades K-3 include more free-form general recommendations.

Check out samples in grades 1-8 here: http://www.globalvillageschool.org/k8-sample.html

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Recipe for a Prejudice-Free Society

By Kamron Yazdani

“Peace-o-Pie”

10 lbs. love of humanity

1 teaspoon seeds of positive energy

1 teaspoon cream of martyr

2 cups wine of justice and mercy

1/4 cup freedom

1 pound tolerance and open-mindedness

5 teaspoons essence of unity

1 passport

Dash flavor and harmony

1 spoon of the sweet honey of nature

2 “peaces” clarified butter

Icing of goodwill

2 cherries of humor

Directions:

First, you need to add the base of the entire recipe and work with the goodness of the foundation, to enrich the final result. With that in mind, begin with 10 lbs. love of humanity. To get the recipe started, add a teaspoonful of the seeds of positive energy. Once initiative begins to take place, use 1 teaspoon cream of martyr to put yourself on the right path no matter what the cost. In order to enable the recipe to develop properly, you must include 2 cups of the wine of justice and mercy. To allow the recipe to rise fully, you must include 1/4 cup of freedom.

Next, you must use 1 pound tolerance and open-mindedness so that the flavors of the recipe are balanced. After that’s completed, add 5 teaspoons essence of unity to bring the recipe together. 1 passport is necessary to broaden the recipe. To unify the ingredients, you must use a Dash of flavor and harmony. 1 spoon of the sweet honey of nature will also be needed to sweeten the experience. One of the most important ingredients in this recipe is 2 “peaces” of clarified butter, which is used to enlighten and reveal the flavor. Finish the recipe off with the icing of goodwill, and make sure you don’t wait for it to cool. Finally, you must add two cherries of humor on top to lighten the mood of the dish.

This is a recipe best served with a side of humility and garnished with good intent. Do not serve cool. Must be kept warm for the flavors to reach their full potential.