Name and Title: Marna Hauk, Graduate Faculty
School or Organization Name: Prescott College & the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies
Co-Presenter Name(s): NA
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Teachers and Faculty, School Leadership, Student Leaders, School Technology Staff, Sustainability-Related Teams, Climate Action Staff
Strands: Leadership, Students, Teachers, Curricular
Title: Earth E/mergent - Global Virtual Sensing Networks for Gaian Educational Emergence
Full Session Description: Current planetary patterns including climate change and water crisis invite educational approaches that embody and model connectivity, systems thinking, collaborative creativity, collective knowledge, and shared leadership. These approaches are consonant with ecologically and socially engaged ecoliteracy, which values "empathy, sustainability as a community practice, making the invisible visible, anticipating unanticipated consequences, and understanding how nature sustains life" (Goleman, Bennett, & Barlow, 2012). This session explores one strategy in the gamut of ecological and systems-informed approaches to global challenges: establishing and sharing information across global remote sensing networks.
Remote sensing networks have been effective at enabling students and learning communities to record local phenomena and share that data to understand emergent system effects beyond regional and national borders. This presentation describes some key characteristics of remote sensing networks and highlights some findings of a novel earth educational sensing network this researcher initiated with more than a dozen sites.
Practices for data gathering in sensing networks invite learners to more deeply connect with natural and ecological phenomena. These networks do not replace but instead enhance human sensory awareness and make it more meaningful by connecting it with sensing at other sites to surface patterns beyond the local. This supports a kind of creativity called collaborative emergence (R. Keith Sawyer, 2010).
The data of remote sensing networks utilizes technological platforms or existing technology in creative configurations to cast a wide data net and can deepen biocultural learning, re-embedding learners in their larger ecological, cultural, and planetary contexts.
Leave this session with some key approaches for how your educational context might initiate remote sensing networks to collaborate and clarify planetary systems phenomena. Beyond ecophobic earth disaster overload, remote sensing networks are a Gaian method that can shift educational leaders and communities of learners from fear to action, to re-embed in nature while also connecting across cultural diversity to weave global sensing networks as a living web for collaborative planetary emergence.
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