Why are we creating foundational learning tools?
We want to support an ever-evolving Doughnut Economics (DE) ecosystem that can shift and be represented differently in schools and education. Teachers, students, young and old, from a wide diversity of cultures and geographies are engaging with Doughnut Economics content and continuously ask for a wide range of materials that teachers and learners can easily pick up, which include a plurality of approaches, methods and pedagogies to be flexible and adaptable for use around the world.
What is our vision for learning?
We want to take the Doughnut to young people, adding to their knowledge, growth, and maturity journey, broadening their view of the world, inspiring and empowering them with ideas, images, facts, and figures, and engaging them in how we can shape the world around us differently.
We don't see this as education - certainly not only in the traditional way, just in a classroom - with a teacher explaining how it all works. It is more of a grassroots facilitated space - within or beyond walls - with multi-intersectional and multi-directional relationships and complex dynamics where content is not flattened and instead is ongoing and alive.
This means that learning about Doughnut Economics and being able to do something with it is an open invitation to involve the head (your thinking), heart (your feelings), hands (doing and making) and feet (being; working with what your place and environment calls for). And we understand that this can mean something different everywhere in the world. With this in mind, we have also designed the ‘Preparing to Teach’ tool. This tool aims to support and equip anyone who feels ready to facilitate, lead and teach DE content with the knowledge and skills needed to set a conducive mindset to make the most of the tools, to create the best conditions for new knowledge, emerging ideas, and transformational experiences to flourish and thrive.
What is DEAL's strategy around learning, and learning tools?
We have designed these tools with the ambition that they will be flexible and adaptable to the diversity of cultures and ways of learning around the world, including in/formal education settings, too! With this in mind, we distributed them across a geographically widespread group of DE friends during the Beta pilot to learn if/where/when they work or not. Subsequently, upon receiving feedback and improving all tools where needed, our ambition is to see them spread around the globe in an iterative manner - re-designed, adapted, and modified as we learn more and more and more, indefinitely, from everyone who uses them.
