Biophilic Education in action
Da Vinci Life-Skills are forging forward with our vision for a new education system for the 21st Century. We are now negotiating and preparing our selected pilot projects for 2023 in schools globally.
After a successful pre-pilot last semester, our co-founders Rosina and Zach have just spent an inspiring month together at Empathy Middle School, Bali, Indonesia, where we have launched our first full Da Vinci Life-Skills curriculum and assessment model pilot. We are working with the team of Indonesian teachers, whom Zach has been training, since January to provide the full schemes of work, lesson plans, resources and all the assessment rubrics for this coming semester.
Together with our amazing Youth Advisory Board and a group of enthusiastic young interns, we have embedded all the learning objectives from the UK national curriculum into our 5 contextual, transdisciplinary and fun project pathways. This semester we have a space theme. In their PEP (Personal Exploration Project) students have designed their own emblem and are learning how to build their own passion project. In other projects:
Producing an alien stop-frame animation film.
Designing and planting a permaculture fruit and vegetable garden and running a monthly Farmers Market.
Designing and building an exterior, celestial inspired place of celebration and ceremony for the middle school.
Star Wars RPG (Role Play Game) and High Frontier space travel.
We are also training DVLS Mentors and testing our projects in Cambridge, UK with:
MULTIVERSE GAMES: D&D RPG (Role Play Game) set in Ancient Greece, after-school club, Mondays 4 - 7pm, starting 3rd Oct. 2022
& PRODUCTION: ‘Is beauty inherent in nature?’ multimedia art exhibition project, Saturdays, 1 - 4pm, starting 24th Sept. 2022
Our Cambridge program will expand from January 2023 with more projects, until the opening of our first small Da Vinci Life-Skills Learning Hub (small middle school for 10-14 year olds) in August 2023. Admissions for the Learning Hub will open in December 2022 for the first cohort of 10/11 year olds.
Let us know if you have a school that is interested in running our projects and teacher training program, if you are interested in a place at our Cambridge Learning Hub and if any of you would like the opportunity to invest in our expanding project.
‘Is beauty inherent in nature?’ multimedia art exhibition project, Saturdays, 1 - 4pm, starting 24th Sept. 2022
D&D RPG (Role Play Game) set in Ancient Greece, after-school club, Mondays 4 - 7pm, starting 3rd Oct. 2022
Our Co-founder, Rosina presented a talk on our Da Vinci Life-Skills curriculum and the Biophilic Education movement at the Rethinking Education Conference in London on 17th Sept.
There were many great talks, particularly those from our inspirational Advisory Board, Guy Claxton, Meena Woods and Yumna Hussen and the brilliant Naomi Fisher. They will all be shared publicly soon. Join The Mighty Network - https://rethinking-ed.org
We are honoured to have received seed funding from Cambridge Universities future thinking Homerton Changemakers group.
On Friday 30th September we are looking forward to a celebration dinner at the college.