Project Partners

Sophia’s Hearth

The Antioch Center for School Renewal is proud to offer graduate credit in association with Sophia’s Hearth!

Today’s young children are eager for life, for exploring the world, for encountering others in a meaningful, intimate way. To support these young ones to grow into adults who have strength, enthusiasm, confidence and joy for life asks deep devotion to their care.  As teachers and parents, our gift to the growing child is to recognize and support above all his or her unfolding spirit.  We must also prepare ourselves in practical ways to meet the children who come into our lives.

Sophia’s Hearth Family Center offers three weeks of professional development courses.  Our summer faculty brings depth of experience and knowledge developed over years of caring for young children and their families, and studying the development of the child.   Our courses bring a clear emphasis upon looking at early childhood education through the lens of human development and the unfolding human spirit.  There are moments when life calls us to find a new viewpoint, to clarify our vocational commitment and personal path.  Perhaps you find yourself in such a moment.  We invite you to join us this summer for study, colleagueship, renewal, and new views.

Country Dance & Song Society

Folk Arts for the Classroom
Sunday-Sunday, July 31-August 7, 2016
Held during Family Week at Ogontz.
The course is led by Kari Smith, adjunct faculty member in the education department at Antioch University New England.View the syllabus for the graduate credit option.

Program Description

This is a chance for teachers to attend a week-long folk camp for people of all ages. You will observe and participate while master folklorists teach groups of children traditional dances, songs, crafts, stories and rituals. You will participate in these folk traditions at an adult level yourself and “collect” by audio-recording, interviewing, note taking and experiencing traditional activities. We will meet daily in a Teacher Seminar led by Kari Smith to reflect on your observations and experiences and to share newly-collected activities. Kari Smith, Program Director

More information about this program. Please check out the description of Family Week at Ogontz for details on the rich and varied program and staff.

Heinemann Publishers

ACSR is proud to partner with Heinemann, a publisher of professional resources and a provider of educational services for teachers, kindergarten through college. We support Heinemann’s goal to give voice to those who share our respect for the professionalism and compassion of teachers and who support teachers’ efforts to help children become literate, empathetic, knowledgeable citizens.

Heinemann is guided by the following principles:

  • Heinemann cares deeply about teachers.
  • Heinemann is wholeheartedly committed to teaching excellence.
  • Heinemann is the leader in professional teacher development.
  • Heinemann’s authors and classroom resources are transformative.
  • Heinemann makes good teaching accessible to all.

ACSR is please to support participants in Heinemann’s Digital Campus experience by offering graduate credit in conjunction with select courses beginning with Mary Ehrenworth’s Harnessing the Common Core Standards to Achieve Higher Levels of Reading and Writing Grades K;12.  Registered participants in this course can receive 1 graduate credit by submitting additional documentation of learning to the AUNE faculty member assigned to the course.  Learn more by downloading the Student Instructions and visit the Heinemann Digital Campus website to register.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

ACSR is a professional development affiliate of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills which supports the integration of 21st century skills into all aspects of teaching and learning.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills is the leading advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education. The organization brings together the business community, education leaders, and policy makers to define a powerful vision for 21st century education to ensure every child’s success as citizens and workers in the 21st century by providing tools and resources to help facilitate and drive change.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills Professional Development Affiliate Program equips individuals and organizations with resources and assistance in integrating 21st century skills into their professional development practice.

To learn more about how ACSR can support your efforts to move instruction and assessment into the 21st Century, contact us.

Q.E.D. Foundation

Bringing synergy to the relationships of educators, families and young people provides powerful energy for revitalizing our schools and our communities. Grounded in extensive research and practice, the Q.E.D. Foundation brings practical applications, diverse expertise, accomplished student voice and valuable family perspectives. Q.E.D.’s mission is to help our clients ; K-12 schools and community organizations across the United States ; empower each individual with the knowledge and skills to use his or her unique voice effectively and with integrity in co-creating our common public world.

With foundational roots in Antioch’s Critical Skills program, Q.E.D. and Antioch Center for School Renewal have long partnered on creating and sustaining practices that create and sustain student-centered communities. Learn more about Q.E.D at http://www.qedfoundation.org/

The School Reform Initiative

The School Reform Initiative, Inc. supports the development of professional learning communities in schools – that is, groups of educators with a common interest in improving educator practice in order to ensure high student achievement and equitable outcomes for all students. They do this through the development of critical friendship focused on transformational learning and courageous conversations.

SRI members are committed to making their practice public to one another, to being reflective, and to holding each other accountable for meeting the needs and interests of all students.  Through critical friendship, educators share resources and ideas, support each other in implementing new practices, and build relationships among colleagues characterized by mutual trust and freedom from judgment, while keeping a keen focus on issues of equity.  They most often work in on-going, collaborative groups where they freely discuss each other’s practice with the intention of improving student learning.

Essential questions SRI members ask themselves include:

  • How do I engage in and facilitate adult dialogue and collaboration that results in higher levels of learning for all students, and especially, for those students who are struggling and/or who are under served?
  • How can teacher collaboration reduce/eliminate the predictive value of race and class on student success in school and in life?
  • What is the role of risk-taking in adult learning?
  • How do adult collaboration, reflective discourse, and de-privatized practice support student achievement?
  • What are the collegial conversations that make a difference?

Under the guidance of a coach or facilitative leader, these collaborative groups of educators use various protocols and processes to develop shared norms and values; focus on student learning; make their practice public to one another; engage in reflective dialogue and collaborative work; and inquire into, analyze and reflect upon student learning data.  In so doing, they develop the knowledge, will, skill, perspective, commitment and courage to address the most important dilemmas and questions they have about their practice.

Awareness Through the Body (ATB) USA

Awareness Through the Body was developed in India with children in Auroville schools.  Auroville is an intentional, international community in southern India, dedicated to the search for human unity and best known for it’s groundbreaking projects in environmental sustainability. For more than fifteen years, children in the Auroville Schools and in the surrounding village schools have participated in weekly or bi-weekly ATB classes and for many children the differences have been profound. Workshops for adults with many different backgrounds (teachers, yoga instructors, artists, body workers, therapists) have been offered in India, Holland, Spain, and the United States since 2004.

What children say about ATB:

“It made me more aware of everything around, and it made me much more open. When I get nervous now, or angry, I always return to my breath to cool down.They gave us exercises to quiet us down and then exercises to bring us back, exercises on how to develop the senses and awareness, and how to use the senses and how to recognize feelings.The group work was very important. You learn how to find your own way in a group and one thing we learned is that if it didn’t work one way we could try another.”

“I know I am not good at physical things but I remembered to use my breath and my will to get calm and focused. Then I won the discus toss!”

Awareness Through the Body offers tools for living in the world of today: tools to increase self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-confidence; tools to enable children and adults to be witness to their own thoughts, feelings, moods, actions and interactions with others; tools to reduce stress, to concentrate and still the mind. These tools are useful for any person, young or old, male or female. Aloka, one of the founders of ATB, says, “Everybody is given the space they need in ATB so they can find their own way of working.  The emphasis is put on what they do well.”Recently we have even begun exploring the possibilities of ATB for children with specific learning problems, such as Asperger’s or ADHD, with some hopeful results, as ATB enables children to focus, to quiet themselves, and to observe their own responses to triggering events.

There is a particular need for children of today to develop these skills. They spend many hours sitting, either in classrooms or in front of a screen. They are less and less active physically but mentally they are bombarded with a variety of visual and oral stimuli, some of which is violent in content or presentation. Obesity and inability to concentrate are only two of the problems attributed to the reduced range of physical activity and the increased stimulation. Children come to school with a burden of anxiety from the tensions in our society and the increasing fragmentation of social support systems from the family and the community. With ATB, children gradually learn to focus, concentrate, relax and feel a sense of accomplishment.

The Founders and Instructors

The Summer 2015 Keene workshops were led by Aloka Marti (method creator) and Francesco Colturi (certified facilitator) with Drs. Heidi Watts and Margo MacLeod, adjunct faculty.

The Instructor and Co-Creator of ATB:

  • Aloka Marti has been living in Auroville, India since 1991. With Joan Sala, she developed the program Awareness Through the Body for children in the Auroville Schools. More recently they have added a corresponding sequence for adults. The work draws on a deep understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga and their experience in many disciplines such as Tai Chi, dance, martial arts, massage, Alexander, yoga and physiotherapy.
  • The original work has evolved into a sequential series of activities combining strategies from dance, movement, yoga, mindfulness, new games and physical therapy which are engaging and effective with children of all ages, and indeed, with adults as well. All of the workshop activities can be used with children from quiet breathing to negotiating an obstacle course collaboratively. The experiential nature of the workshops makes it possible for participants to learn deeply and to adapt the rich variety of activities to settings from schools to old age homes or to use as part of an individual practice.

The Book, Awareness Through the Body

In 2006 Joan and Aloka published Awareness Through The Body, which describes the evolution of the work from the philosophy of Integral Education. Organized around themes such as Concentration, Attention, Physical Structure, and sensory awareness, it explicitly describes relevant activities, giving the purpose and place of each in the sequence and details their experiences when doing the activities with children. The book is enriched by several hundred photographs of children engaged in these activities, from a group symmetry exercise with music, to a child, blindfolded, meditatively feeling the bark of a tree. Teachers who attend the workshops often buy the book as a user’s manual and for inspiration. The book can be purchased through amazon.com.

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