Pedagogy for Self and Planet: A workshop/retreat for professors
Date: July 28 – August 3, 2013
Location: Lama Foundation, San Cristobal, New Mexico

How can higher education best address environmental challenges? How can we most skillfully teach environmental studies with optimism and a sober sense of ecological realities? This workshop focuses on the role of contemplation in environmental education. It explores the relationshipbetween teaching environmental studies and cultivating our inner lives. Through scholarly discussions, artistic exercises, and regular contemplative practice (meditation, yoga, journaling, and nature walks), participants will investigate ways to deepen their teaching and enrich their lives at this historic moment of environmental intensification.

Part workshop and part retreat, this 6-day summer institute provides an opportunity to step back from the frenetic pace of our lives, and develop pedagogical tools and cultivate inner resources for engaging environmental education on a fragile and wild planet. The Institute will take place at the Lama Foundation in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Lama is an offgrid, eco-laboratory committed to sustainable and mindful living. It is surrounded by the 1.5 million-acre Carson National Forest and draws its power from the sun, water from a spring, and much of its food in the summer directly from the garden. Since before Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now under its ponderosa pines, it has served as retreat center to explore the relationship between one’s inner life and outer engagements.

Faculty

• Daniel Barbezat, Professor of Economics, Amherst College, and Director of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
• Matthew Jelacic, Assistant Professor of Environmental Design, University of Colorado at Boulder
• Michelle McCauley, Professor of Psychology, Middlebury College
• Nicole Salimbene, visual artist whose work explores intimacy and sustainability
• Paul Wapner, Professor of Global Environmental Politics at American University, and author of, Living Through the End of Nature, and Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics
• Jeff Warren, Meditation Instructor and author of Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

More Information
Lama Foundation
Contact: Paul Wapner or Joe Brodnik

Cost: $950, includes all meals, workshop fee and workshop materials