Preparing to Teach

How have we structured the tools for flexibility and ease of use?

Through an initial sensing phase of DEAL’s schools and education communities around the world, we learned the importance of creating educational tools that are accessible to many age groups, which can be adopted globally, and engage learners holistically. As a result, each foundational tool that we have designed is therefore composed of a number of learning elements, which we call ‘cards’, which are also bespoke to specific school-learning age-brackets (5-7 years old, 8-11 years old, 12-16 years old, and 17-18 years old). The tools and each card - 'preparing to teach’ space cards (yellow), insight cards (orange), activity cards (green) and reflect cards (blue) - have been designed to be flexible and adaptable to the diversity of cultures and ways of learning around the world, including informal/formal, rural/urban education settings too. Therefore, the cards’ content, age brackets, and duration may be shifted up or down depending on the particular context in which they may be used. Images and guidance can be modified to fit the diversity of learners, their everyday contexts, their aspirations, etc. These tools are certainly not perfect but a first step...

What these tools cannot do

In alignment with our 'vision for learning' section under the Schools & Education Thematic page, our foundational tools' design does not conform with the design of mainstream education materials. They are not the usual 'same containers but with different content'. 

We recognise that we have made compromises in order to be accessible to current dominant perspectives of what schools and education should be — their goals, aspirations, and values; their philosophies, curriculums design, establishments and institutions’ organisational structures, etc. However, we have also taken steps to contribute towards loosening and opening up, via small transformative gestures and ambiguous sketches, alternative ways of learning (knowing, being and doing) that amplify proposals for more expansive, plural, ways of sharing knowledge and skills across cultures. Ways that enhance our understanding that people and planet in rhythm = ONE. Education that challenges the normalisation of anthropocentric and ego-centric unsustainable ways of living patterns, and instead prepares humanity to live within the doughnut. 

So... these foundational tools do not offer traditional ways of measuring success and attainment either. They do not include predefined learning objectives,  learning outcomes, or assessment. Their language is reciprocal, and engagement is intrinsic, self-reflective, collective and systemic, with playfulness and humour employed as key strategies to resist the need for quick fixes. Instead, they welcome and invite people to learn how to navigate complex, fuzzy and messy boundaries, as well as uncertainty and incoherence. 

What is our approach to improving these tools on an ongoing basis?

We are currently, and will continue to, modify the Doughnut Economics Foundational tools where necessary, based on the following design principles:

1. Being critical about the expression of a system that has given rise to the current mindset: an education that shapes people into believing that the current society and globalisation is what we should all aspire to.
2. Be an invitation to experience with head, heart, hands, and feet through a diversity of learning media (written, visual/drawings, music/songs, stories/narrative, embodied experiences/dance, analysis).
3. Be an invitation to the creation of fertile spaces from the beginning and iteratively through the learning journey; not an afterthought.
4. Be accessible to a diversity of socio-cultural-economic contexts.