Creative Educators International Network (CEIN)
Costa Rica Conference: April 01 – 05 2018
Fostering a Sustainable World Through Value Creating Education
At Earth Charter Education Center, University of Peace and Quality Hotel in San Jose
CREATIVE EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL NETWORK, Inc., (CEIN) is a non-profit NGO dedicated to helping communities become sustainable through value-creating education, and to inspire educators who are implementing Value-Creating Education in different ways. CEIN held its conference this year in Costa Rica.
CEIN wants to share our experience at the EC Education Center which was the first part of our conference. We learned here that educating and learning is to live in a space of reciprocal acceptance, where there is legitimate respect for oneself and others and a special deep gratitude, appreciation and respect for the environment. CEIN members come from different countries, so experiencing this together will have a profound effect on our work together.
Mirian Vilela, Executive Director of the Earth Charter International (ECI) 
inspired us through workshops in nature using our own experiences and then had us share this new meaning with each other. Using our five senses, she invited us to learn to perceive our internal and external environment together. We acquired “sensory experiences” and then shared our feelings with each other and what we learned together.
Daisaku Ikeda, CEIN’s Value Creating Education mentor, (2002) echoes the importance of this kind of education. “It is only with a common vision and a joint effort to achieve it that we can welcome a more hopeful future. For this reason, it is imperative that the international community support and value the Earth Charter.”
We next learned to use the Earth Charter from a pedagogical perspective. ECI provides playful forms, teaching lessons, for educators and pupils; animated short films designed to educate the younger generation about the importance of doing little things to take care of our planet.
In the third workshop, Mirian presented how the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, interrelate with the principles of the Earth Charter. Our deep support for one Earth Charter Principle or SDG goal will positively affect all global problems. This concurs with Value Creating Education too.
For Day 2 and 3 of our conference we further developed our CEIN Offline curriculum for Sustainable Community Educators. This began with Dialogue Skills for Communities, which will become a foundation class.
This was followed by presentations of three experiences: Sustainable Community Education from an Amazonian perspective, Value Creating Gardening at a school in India, and an International Peace Education conflict resolution issue from a suburban neighborhood dispute in the U.S.
Mirian Vilela and Alicia Jimenez were invited to join the rest of our conference. We identified many ways to work together and how useful the Earth Charter will be to us. We also discussed our community-measuring tool and the role it will play to help communities discover their strengths.
Finally on our last day, at The University of Peace, we were invited to conduct a tree planting ceremony to commemorate our stay. We were overwhelmed with gratitude to be forever part of UPEACE and ECI.
With great solemnity, we did the planting and with great feeling in our hearts, we took our photograph with the knowledge we had created a conference with spectacular meaning on its campus.
We recorded a moment that will remain unforgettable. Next to this tree will be placed a plaque “CEIN: Promoting Sustainable Communities through Value Creating Education.” This is a small change from the title of the conference and done because each of us became dedicated to the community of life where we live.
Written by CEIN team.
Click here for more information on CEIN.