By Frances Madeson
For the last 12 years, under founder and President Jaimie P. Cloud’s dynamic and committed leadership, the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education has been creating and delivering curriculum and educator training for K-12 schools throughout the United States. The aim is “to develop in young people and their teachers new knowledge and new ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity, participate democratically, secure justice and equity, and all the while regenerate the health of the ecosystems, the gift upon which all life and all production depend.”
Using brain science, ecological principles, and other relevant content, the Cloud Institute creates transformative learning experiences geared to breaking through the mental models that prevent people from understanding the need for behavioral change. They’ve honed tools that engage human creative processes —games, questioning, storytelling, a set of readings to foster discussion—that effectively help shift the paradigm and train children to become change agents. To wit, the Cloud Institute’s appealingly informative website features a fun but challenging fishing contest:
“Though adults are absolutely capable of learning and changing their frames and behaviors, we focus on children,” Jaimie, an internationally respected expert who has written and lectured widely on these issues, explained to me at the Institute’s green and very serene Manhattan offices. “We engage them even as early as before pre K, because it’s a critical time for learning. Norms haven’t been established and it’s far easier to create thinking than to change thinking. Plus, children have a huge influence over each other, as well as their families and communities.”
Students are taught how to handle moments of friction while respecting others’ autonomy. Jaimie unpacked why the curriculum stresses modeling the desired change and clearly expressing aspirations. “If someone tells you what you should do, it invades your autonomy, which we know from brain science is a key to change.You might even do the thing they tell you to once, but probably not again because you didn’t think of it yourself and you don’t own it. If a parent litters, the child can pick up the trash, throw it away and state, ‘I want to live in a clean world.’”
The program is focused on creating epiphanies through positive possibilities of hope, vision and creativity. “That’s where you get all the energy,” Jaimie said with a brilliant smile. “Not from bad news; that is crippling. Everyone who does this work, loves this work, because the work itself is win, win, win. Getting schools to plant gardens, serve healthier lunches, re-organize priorities to foster the health of their students and communities.”
Over the long and winding road that has been the Cloud Institute’s journey to successful institutional stability, Jaimie has steered through the inevitable moments of struggle and setback by remembering two foundational ecological principles. The first is: There are always delays in the system. And the second: Appropriate disturbances create the new cycles of life.
I chuckled that one word—sustainability—could create both so much wisdom and so much devoted work. Jaimie reminded me why. “The component parts are ‘sustain’ and ‘able’: nothing is guaranteed. There’s a challenge implicit in the word, which is for us to create the favorable conditions in which we all can thrive.”
About the Author
Frances Madeson is the author of the novel Cooperative Village and still lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
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