The Earth Charter International Secretariat in collaboration with Stephanie Tansey (read her bio in the second part of this article) is organizing an online workshop on dialogue and communication skills to promote sustainability.
This workshop will take place on October 13th, 2011 at 13:00hrs GMT (2:00pm London time, 9:00am New York time, 9:00 pm China time).
Use this link to enter to the virtual meeting room:
http://earthcharter.wiziq.com/online-class/629657-workshop-dialogue-and-communication-skills
Click on the ‘Launch Class’ button, the system will ask to type your name, please add your country too, only use alpha numeric characters (no space or symbols, e.g. MaryCanada).
In this workshop, Stephanie Tansey, a longtime supporter of the Earth Charter, will demonstrate how she has been teaching the principles of the Earth Charter and the methods she uses that have worked effectively in Turkmenistan, Israel, Nigeria, and now in China.
Stephanie Tansey is part of the Earth Charter Communities Network (ECCN), an informal group of passionate educators who believe that just agreeing that the Earth Charter principles are critical to the whole community of life is not enough. ECCN’s intent is to create communities where the principles become values for living wisely. To accomplish this goal, they have found that better dialogue skills, writing communication, community-building, and deepening the connection between our traditional cultural values and the values of a modern, sustainable society are critical. Participants discover that thinking, communicating and acting like a community of life has made their relationships improve, their writing is more effective, and their desire to support their community grows. In many cases their community changes for the better.
ECCN programs, in Israel from 2005, Nigeria from 2008 and China from 2009, are a work in progress as they are constantly creating and implementing new ways of practicing sustainability. As Stephanie Tansey said: “This is the power of teaching the principles of the Earth Charter. People become global citizens who want to save the world and go out into their communities to help them get better”.
Stephanie Tansey is the director of Earth Charter Communities Network, an informal international network of people dedicated to nurturing self-educators to want to become global citizens. Today she teaches this program at Beijing Normal University’s Environmental Education Center, and at a village project in sustainable society-building in Henan, China.
In other countries, this program has helped to create a community education center in Turkmenistan, nurtures communication in adult and women’s groups in Israel and Nigeria, has transformed an at-risk school for the poor into a center of change of a whole community in Nigeria, and was the foundation for the beginning of a community enterprise in Nigeria. ECCN has handbooks for their programs in English, and one in Hebrew and Arabic coming out soon.
She was born and raised in Japan, has a B.A. from New York University in Humanities and an M.S in Japanese from Georgetown University. She began a Social Foundations of Education PhD program in University of Maryland College Park in 1991, but moved to Beijing and chose instead to establish the New School of Collaborative Learning (1993-2004).
The Earth Charter was the foundational document for the school mission which was to nurture global citizens. She began designing transformative education programs using the Earth Charter in 1999 in the Washington, DC area, at the SGI Imagine Peace Conference at the World Bank in 2001 and at an at-risk school in Fairfax, VA and has continued to develop her program to the needs of the countries she lived in with her husband Bob, then a U.S. Diplomat. Now living in Beijing again, believing that China could be a tipping point for the planet, she is dedicated to helping teachers and students awaken to their potential as transformational global citizens.