Learning at Earthville Institute

EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION
FOR COMPASSIONATE CHANGEMAKERS

We endeavor to awaken deeper curiosity and wonder in all who participate in our programs, nurturing the joy of learning and the drive to make the best of every opportunity for deeper understanding, personal growth, vocational development, and service to the greater good — often all at once.

Our approach to experiential education is highly personalized and self-directed yet strongly community-oriented. Rather than spoon-feeding information to our participants, we focus on creating a supportive environment for discovery so that motivated learners can make connections for themselves in the context of a caring and creative community culture.

Distinguishing features of our approach to education

Learning by serving

Our focus on experiential learning (learning by doing and reflecting) and service learning in particular (learning through real-world service work) engages the heart and provides the joy and satisfaction of learning by doing meaningful work in support of a greater good.

Empowering changemakers

The entire Earthville experience is designed to help our participants make positive impacts in the world, fostering insight into how change happens and how we can make a difference, and cultivating the wisdom and skill to become sensitive and effective agents of change.

Holism & systems thinking

We consider the whole person and the whole context to find whole solutions. Our inquiries are fractal, exploring both the macro and micro while observing patterns and connections at every level. And we understand ourselves as systems within larger systems, seeking balance.

Collaborative community

Everything here happens in community, supporting participants to develop skills for living and working harmoniously and productively. Our culture of constructive communication offers useful feedback that increases self-awareness and self-confidence.

Contemplative practices

Meditation, yoga, philosophical explorations, and reflection — especially when practiced together regularly over time — aid the integration of heart and mind, of inner life and outer work. This deepens insight and helps ensure that the best intentions lead to the best results.

Residential immersions

It’s good to study world-changing ideas, and it’s even better to live them. Our residential programs offer immersive explorations where compassionate aspirations are put into action in our daily lives, transforming us through our lived experience of them.

Global awareness + local action

Our big-picture view helps participants understand our world, its urgent challenges, and promising solutions, while our local-scale projects provide training in contextually sensitive application of world-changing ideas on a sustainable and human-doable scale.

Emphasis on well-being

Our programs promote holistic health and “inner sustainability” through balanced lifestyle, healthy diet, conscious movement, and contemplative practice. Over time, participants gain insight and tools for crafting and maintaining a lifestyle of well-being.

Individualized learning

To empower our students, we integrate core principles of learner-centered education — individualized education plans (IEPs), self-directed learning, comprehensive self-evaluation with supportive feedback, and more — for pesonalized learning with community support.

CONTEMPLATIVE SERVICE-LEARNING

Educational research shows that experiential learning — and service learning in particular — are much more effective methods of learning than typical classroom study. Earthville’s approach takes this one step further by integrating a contemplative approach.

Service learning

A type of experiential education focused on learning by doing work that benefits others or the planet

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Contemplative practice

Clearing a space to reflect on our experience with a calm, lucid, meditative quality of mind

Earthville Institute’s programs unite the benefits of service learning and contemplative practice to synthesize the ultimate win-win educational experience. We take the work of positive changemaking itself as the “coursework,” with the real world as the “classroom.” And we bring contemplative awareness to the task at every stage, from conception to execution to reflection. In this way, engaging in meaningful and challenging work for the benefit of something greater than ourselves and then taking time to reflect, we gain all the benefits of experience followed by inquiry and contemplation, plus we feel good about both the process and the beneficial results, which helps to keep the joy of learning alive.

The importance of compassion

At Earthville Institute, everything we do is rooted in the aspiration to live more compassionately and support others to do the same in their own ways. Considering our global climate crisis and the injustices and inequities in our world, there is no societal priority more urgent than activating the innate compassion of every human and channeling that caring into insightful and well-engineered solutions. We embrace this as our principal educational objective.

Earthville Institute’s educational philosophy draws on both the contemplative wisdom traditions of the world and the compassionate principles of Earthville Education. It seeks to make a well-examined exploration of traditional wisdom and infuse that with our best fresh creativity.

› Read Earthville founder Mark Moore’s article on education for compassion.

The importance of holism

Nothing exists in isolation. Everything depends on complex causes and conditions. A holistic approach to learning takes a systems view, recognizing that a part can’t be understood without reference to the whole. Accordingly, we examine the intimate interdependence of all the elements that make up a person, a context, a solution.

The whole person: understanding ourselves and one another as complex beings
The whole context: recognizing the many factors that influence a situation
The whole solution: a way of responding to a situation that takes into account the various interdependent factors at play and addresses the whole picture

A holistic approach to learning is interdisciplinary, experiential, and investigative. By adding the contemplative element as well, we access the benefits of cultivating calm and clear states of mind that are conducive to recognition of connections, patterns, and nuance.