HRP Update March 2023

Hello and welcome to a brief HRP update with me, Nick Covington, Creative Director here at Human Restoration Project. 

As you may have hear, Chris & I are coming off a whirlwind of a week in Columbus, Ohio, where we hosted a team from our Poland-based partners at Holistic Think Tank, Polish teacher representatives from the Polish-American Freedom Foundation, and a rockstar group of American teachers that included a team from our friends in Muskegon, Michigan (be on the lookout for more involvement from them in the future), as well as Trevor Aleo, and Jen Lucas; on the campus of The Ohio State University. The keynote of the conference was from none other than former Finnish minister of education & the author of Finnish lessons, Pasi Sahlberg, speaking not only to the need for systemic change, but the right kind of systemic change: rooted in cooperation, customized curriculum, holistic teaching and learning, trust-based professionalism, and where every school is a good school. 

This was also Holistic Think Tank’s American debut, and what you heard in the introduction was an excerpt from a short documentary, titled Good Day, that they filmed in over half a dozen countries around the world in 2022. The documentary followed the lives of students in Kenya, Lebanon, Poland, United States, Brazil, South Africa, and India to understand their experience of school. HRP participated in both the research study and the film project with the cooperation of Antonio Buehler, the founder of Abrome, in Austin, Texas, both of which are featured prominently in the documentary. A YouTube search for Holistic Think Tank will lead you to the doc very easily, and I’ll have a link in the show notes. We are also hosting a watch party in our Discord book club on March 21st @ 5pm central time. We hope you’ll join us!

The focus of the conference was on the launch of Holistic’s Interdisciplinary Subject, or IDS, for which we developed an interdisciplinary curriculum based on Holistic’s 10 standards of What Schools Ought to Teach, which include “how to confront themselves with challenges, how to function in relation to the world and nature as well as one’s own body, aesthetic & cultural awareness, and how to function in society”. Chris & I presented our vision of an interdisciplinary curriculum, as did the other grantees from the Fab Foundation and the University of Sheffield. We at HRP are thrilled to announce we will be working closely with Holistic AND our friends, Drs Ryan Bramley and Sabine Little of the University of Sheffield in the UK on the next phase of the project: working directly with teachers to test-drive the IDS in schools and gather feedback for a more thorough and coherent rollout in 2024.

With the conference behind us, we have made available SIX of our IDS lessons as a pay-what-you-like resource, as are all of our materials, at humanrestorationproject.org/resources. Of course you can also learn more about Holistic Think Tank and their vision for an interdisciplinary subject @ holisticthinktank.com.

Our other huge announcement is of course the keynote and learning track lineup for our upcoming, fully virtual, Conference to Restore Humanity, July 24-27th, 2023. The feedback we got from last summer’s conference was incredible and we’ve taken it to heart to provide an even better experience, community, and purpose as we will work together to break the doom loop. The simple act of having hope for a better future breaks the doom-loop and builds a platform for action. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the main character, Lauren Olamina, digs and leads others to this well of hope amidst climatological and manmade disaster, disruption, and mass death along the American West Coast. Spreading the philosophy of Earthseed, she writes in her Book of the Living: “The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.” A different world is possible if we overcome the distortion of our senses and see beyond broken systems. By setting our sights toward something new, we can reveal solutions that already exist today.

Leading us in that work in July are Antonia Darder, Cornelius Minor, and Jose Luis Vilson, meaning. These keynotes are flipped, meaning each day we will release a roughly 30-minute recorded keynote from the speaker before getting to spend a full hour in Q&A with them. We’re working to secure our 4th keynote, which we have tentatively lined up as a student activist group. 

Additionally, we will offer 3 asynchronous tracks for you to engage with throughout the week: A Green Education to Change the World, A New Perspective on Education Through Video Game Design, and a third track to be determined.

We will also have live daily workshop events led by teacher teams & organizers to help us put the desire for change into practice. 

Please follow our social media pretty much everywhere @HumResPro and sign up for our newsletter for information & updates as our lineup grows. You can learn more and grab early bird tickets right now @ humanrestorationproject.org/conference

And I will be back with a new podcast episode on March 18th with the incredible Miss Elmi, @MissHElmi on Twitter, an elementary teacher in Canada whose work is rooted in joy, love, & liberation. Be sure to check out the work she is doing with the kids in her class,you can truly feel the energy coming off the screen. I can’t wait to share that conversation with all of you on the 18th. 

Wishing all of our educator friends, listeners, and supporters a wonderful, restful, and safe spring break this month. You deserve it, you’ve earned it. Take care!