The Culhane Instructor Presence Plan

MODULE 1: INSTRUCTOR PRESENCE PLAN 

First Day of the Semester:

First Day Attendance & Learner Introductions

Introduce Yourself

Tell Us About Your Vision!

Abstract:

In brief:  Introduce yourself within this discussion board. Let us know who you are, where you're from, and what you're looking to get out of this course, and what you hope to contribute to envisioning sustainability. Feel free to also respond and interact with your peers. 

(Note that you don't have to necessarily use writing for your introduction to you and your vision; you can use any communication tools available.  I am passionate about video production myself. )

This video introduction talks about my own journey toward Zero Waste:

https://youtu.be/jf2Je5rNjXk 

This one talks about my family's commitment to sustainability at home: 

https://youtu.be/GOVL1-5slkU

This one talks about political values as they relate to sustainability and climate change:
https://youtu.be/_oMejbF-7bI

 Now you know a bit about me.  Let's talk about YOU!

In detail:

FIRST WEEK ATTENDANCE POLICY

Being attentive to climate change mitigation and adaptation; preparing to model alternative futures, communicate best practices, and create action and hope-inspiring narratives.

Are you PRESENT?

Like, really present?

USF Policy asks us to submit your "attendance" the first day of class, but in a course about climate change mitigation and adaptation, attendance is far more than just a human gluteus maximus seated in a chair in a classroom or in front of a computer screen. 

We want to know "what were you attending to while we gathered today to share our mutual interests in perpetuating a healthy world?" What were you paying attention to?  What did you see, hear, experience, learn, say, contribute? What went on during the time we had together?

Therefore... to be marked "present" we need some record of our presence -- not just your "body" but your entire mind-body-spirit complex.  What were you thinking about tonight? How does what we discussed in class connect with YOUR life, your feelings, your ambitions, hopes and dreams, fears and reservations and concerns, your state of BEING (which the German philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger called your "Dasein")?

For this assignment, assignment number one, write a relational summary (minimum one page, at least three paragraphs) that introduces you to the class and lets us know how your presence on this earth since your arrival and your presence in class this first day is/was connected to the course topics that we are here to talk about. 

Turn it in and you will be considered to have been PRESENT and in ATTENDANCE!

PLEASE NOTE THAT A RELATIONAL SUMMARY NEED NOT BE WRITTEN.

VIDEOS INTRODUCING  YOURSELVES AND RELATING YOUR LIFE EXPERIENCE AND EXPECTATIONS TO THE TOPIC ARE ENCOURAGED!!

After these are submitted, you will have a chance to PEER REVIEW each other's relational summaries so that you can get to know each other better right out of the gate!  In the peer review, comment on what the other person shared about their experience and relationship to the class topic and connect.  Each person gets three peer reviewers. This helps you not only build community and end anonymity but gives you a chance to get to know the peer review process that makes science one of the most powerful and important disciplines in democratic decision making.

The peer process will win you extra points!

SPECIAL CLARIFICATION:

The rubric asks you to include at least three ideas/quotes/comments from OTHER STUDENTS in the class each time you do a relational summary, as a way of creating a group discussion, creating a community, sharing experience, being attentive to one another and supportive of one another along the journey to erudition.

Obviously, if you are one of the first three students you couldn't possibly comment on student work that hasn't been submitted!  So what to do?

Well, the answer is simple -- the first few students to submit a relational summary or "attentive to the nexus" document gets BONUS POINTS.  

If you are the first you get 5 bonus points. If you are the second or third you get 3 bonus points, plus you can earn another 2 bonus points for including information from the first or second student's document.  This way you can not lose!

But wait! There's more!

In Culhane classes, you can ALWAYS GO BACK AND REVISE and EARN MORE POINTS.

My father was a professional writer for film and television and magazines and an author of books.  He told me "Son, the trick to writing is REWRITING".  Every draft was an improvement on a previous draft.  So I carry that philosophy into my assessment in education: everything you do can be rewritten, added to, appended, updated, and the more you do the more you earn. The trick to getting points is to make valid points about a subject -- to have something to say and then refining it so you have even more to say. So if you didn't get points because you had no other student's work to reflect upon today, you could always check back tomorrow or next week or ANYTIME during the semester and keep adding to your document, and let us know and ask for MORE POINTS.

Capice?

The more you learn the more you earn. The more you do the more you get.  Think of everything you do in our classes as a work in progress, as an evolving document, as a chance to up your game, to level up, to get better and better.  

Regarding "due dates":

I set "deadlines" as suggestions for when things SHOULD BE DUE to help keep us all on track and to help you manage and budget your time.  But I never close the assignments/discussions and you are encouraged to always go back and reexamine what you wrote and improve and add more as you learn more. Your documents, like you, are precious testimony to the time you spent on this earth, and are how you present your best self to the rest of us.  See your work as a piece of you that is always growing.  Keep copies of what you did and who you were, for the sake of understanding your journey, but know that in the end what counts is not where you were, but where you end up relative to where you were! And note that NOBODY IS PENALIZED OR LOSES POINTS FOR BEING "LATE".  I would like you to set your own schedules and be responsible for getting things done in a timely fashion so that we can respect each other's time and the need for people to get feedback and interact.  But we are all adults now and we understand that people sometimes can't get to things within the ideal time frame.  What we have as members of a class is a relationship and when what we are doing or can't do impacts other's schedules we simply need to communicate. 

We are all "works in progress" and we are here to help each other, and our world, be the best that it can be."

Thanks,

Your Captain, on the voyage to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

First Week:

Hi "team sustainabilitist envisioneers",

Believe me, we get it: You're BUSY. 

Often overwhelmed. 
Even though it's only the first week.
But we got your back. 
As your instructor I got your back.
To succeed in this world of multiple overlapping crises and opportunities we always need to hit the ground running, don't we? We are racing the "climate change clock". That is true.
But this isn't a race against anyone, and it certainly isn't a competition.  We need to solve the problems you came here to study by solving them together.  Because we are all in this together.  All in the same life boat.

Our goal this first week, out the gate then, is  to get to know one another and start understanding the possible problem solving  synergies that will emerge if we work as a close-knit team.
 The best way to keep on track as we dash toward 11th hour implementation of the important sustainability solutions we study, is to understand what motivates each of us and what demotivates us so that we can harness the best of each of us.  

My goal is to create an "instructor presence" that gives you confidence that EVERYTHING YOU DO can be a net contribution and ally to sustainability and your own and our collective success -- in school, out of school, on planet earth, off planet earth...
As sustainabilitist envisioneers in training we need to figure out ways to turn waste into value (even supposedly "wasted time") and liabilities into assets. 
So before we plunge into the science and policy content of our course,  let's look at the diagram of "instructor presence" (which should really be "instructor and student presence" in my opinion) and discuss the PSYCHOLOGY of learning and applying vital knowledge so we can
1) Enhance our "degrees of availability" for one another

2) Increase our "level of responsiveness" to one another

3) Engage with and help any one of us who is struggling (eco-anxiety is a real thing as is school anxiety)
4) Engage with "procrastinators" and help us manage our own "procrastination" 

5) BUILD A COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS and

6) Improve the overall connections that we create here this semester

How much easier it would be to build that community and achieve these goals and truly be PRESENT for one another if we could meet face to face.
Alas, we are in an asynchronous on-line environment, so we need to work together with every PRESENTATION tool and technique available to increase our PRESENCE so it FEELS like we are really together, activating those atavistic properties of the human psyche that create a feeling of motivated tribal belonging.

As I and all of our faculty at USF  continue our training in On-Line Education (at USF we are all going "back to school" and take a 4 week course in advanced on-line course design for a new state level re-certification) I ponder (and would like your feedback on) how to more effectively engage those who are said to be "procrastinators" and those who are "struggling". 

First off, I want you to know that I am steeped in my decades long studies of Environmental Psychology and Environmental Sustainability and Justice and approach this from the angle that if any of you are struggling, we should be able to find a course design and delivery system that ends that struggle and makes you feel energized and confident. 

But we need YOU to let us know your learning style, your challenges, your schedule and your possible conflicts so we can CUSTOMIZE this semester's experience to YOUR needs.  That is our first week task. That way nobody risks stumbling.  Since we aren't in a competition we need to eliminate anxiety about "falling behind".  There is no "ahead" or "behind", there is only, as Yoda famously said, "Do, or do not do".  You are in an asynchronous online course because, assumedly, you like to learn at your own pace.
We also want you to be able to learn in YOUR OWN WAY. So you will have to TELL US what that feels like and how we can accommodate one another through our diversity and multiple intelligences.

A course without coercion

Since I subscribe to McGregor's Theory Y and Ouchi's Theory Z and eschew Theory X entirely, there is no way that I am ever going to use force or intimidation or power differential or threats to try and extrinsically motivate. That isn't a sustainable or just psychology.

What I am thinking about now and want to work on with you this first week and throughout the semester is how to create an ECOSYSTEM of performance engagement that works like a rainforest or coral reef (utilizing metaphoric biomimicry). 

 
The idea is this:

An earthworm (Annelidae) and a bee (Hymenopterae) and an ant and Gopher Tortoise and a tree all perform vital functions for the ecosystem, but none of them need to be "coerced" to do their part; they contribute merely by "being", by "living", by following their own self interest.

Adam Smith famously thought that we humans could do the same too (as explained in his famous treatise "The Wealth of Nations") but so far, since scholars and teachers and businesses and politicians failed to utilize his "Theory of Moral Sentiments"  his optimizing "invisible hand" has yet to manifest in a sustainable or just fashion.

I'm inclined to believe that we haven't been able to achieve our putative democratic free-thinking free-market ideals because we almost never get to practice them in school. If we did, then, I submit, we would see the flourishing of a free society.

To prove this hypothesis I am employing, as you will discover in all my courses, Plato's Maieutic Method.  It is a gentler variant of the Socratic Method (Socratic Dialog, the "dialectic" can become too combative when people focus more on debate than co-creation; maieutic is Greek for "midwife" and involves each of us shepherding or stewarding ideas and projects into fruition rather than ranking them in a Darwinian fashion.)
We are striving to create an Instructor and Student Presence that is responsive to and accommodating to ALL student needs and capabilities.

The question I want to pose to you this week (with relevance to the question of how entire cities, like Medellin, Colombia, can climb out of poverty and crime and environmental injustice) is "how can we design our courses so that you can get meaningful credit, like the otherwise blind earthworm, by simply BEING YOURSELF?

In other words, how can we "harvest" your activities -- the ones that come natural to YOU, the ones you are intrinsically motivated to do without any cajoling -- so that you can perform academically at a dignified respectful and professional and productive level that can help you become a true asset to society and be rewarded with the value that will make your life joyful?

Is there a way to eliminate the "struggle" and the tendency to "procrastinate"?  What would it look like if a course, instead of trying to externally "motivate you", instead took advantage of the MOTIONS you are already going through?  You are all already motivated by something and are moving toward some personal goals.  How do we ALIGN what you are naturally doing or are interested in doing with the goals of our courses?

That is the challenge I would like to solve with you in order to make sure NOBODY falls short.

A word on procrastination and struggle:

The word "procrastinate" is fascinating in the context of Sustainability and Justice:

"pro- ‘forward’ + crastinus ‘belonging to tomorrow’ (from cras ‘tomorrow’)."

By calling students who "put off until tomorrow what they could (or should?) be doing today" "PROCRASTINATORS"  I submit that we are passing an unfair judgement.

Miriam Webster says, "The word means moving or acting slowly so as to fall behind, and it implies blameworthy delay especially through laziness or apathy."

But this is judgmental and comparative in debilitating rather than motivating ways!

First of all, we should never DEFINE people using nouns that fix their identities -- any child psychologist can tell you this. You don't say, "You are bad" you say "you are BEHAVING badly", lest you stigmatize a child.

You need to use, as many indigenous groups do, the -ING form of a word, the present participle or gerund. It suggests a verb in action, in motion, and this motion can be turned in a different direction.

A noun just sits there, like a rock, inert. Dead. Unfeeling, unthinking, un-motivatable.

"You are a procrastinator, right?"

"Yes sir, so it is useless trying to motivate or change me. I yam what I yam."

But what if we pro-crastinate in order to do BETTER tomorrow?

What if we actually have faith in tomorrow and know that we will be more capable the more that time passes?

Is it possible to reward students for allowing their best work to "BELONG TO TOMORROW"?

If that is the case and there are no "procrastinators" but merely people who don't wish to be judged while in an unfinished state, surely we can find ways to reward progress, to reward motion. We don't have to motivate, we merely have to observe the motions you are already making and align ourselves with them. With you, as you progress toward a better tomorrow.

There should be NO struggle and certainly no "struggling students". Do you struggle as you walk when you are moving where you want to go?

Only if people put barriers in your path.

What if we REMOVE ALL BARRIERS?

When we say "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and stop passing judgement, are you not then eager to experiment, knowing there is no "failure"?

And can't we reward you for those experiments all along so that you never have to put things off to tomorrow?
Please, sustainabilist envisioneers, DON'T LET THE PERFECT BE THE ENEMY OF THE GOOD!
Please internalize that message this first week of class, and start EXPERIMENTING. Start creating and SHARING. 

What are your unfinished thoughts about this?

Every Day:

The reach for "perfection" is a HABIT.  You shoot for the stratosphere, you often fall to the earth. You shoot for the moon you may make it to the stratosphere or even the Exosphere. You shoot for the stars you may make it to Mars.  
Whatever your goal is, you have to make the striving for it a daily practice, a routine. We never get off the ground by merely staring at the sky and dreaming. Dreaming is mandatory and vitally important, but so is doing the leg work and the handwork and the wing-work.  

Every day in this class I would like you to try to make at least 4 points and try to do so for 5 days out of the week consistently. 
You can think of "making points" as taking notes relevant the course material, engaging in a discussion/conversation about the course material or beginning to write up your thoughts/summarize the material and try to relate to it.  Making points should ultimately come to feel easy if you make it habitual. If you think of points as dots that make up a line and lines as "thread like"  things that make up bigger figures to put together a larger coherent picture, then making or adding points to the thread of  a discussion isn't such a big deal.  The thing is that in our classes you can trade in  the  points  you think fit the bigger picture  for credit points. If you "fail to get your point across" you simply try to make it again, just as, if you were adding points to an image that don't seem to work with the big picture, you would move those points or try to make them again within the lines of the picture you are co-creating with others.

Your goal  -- to perform at what commensurate institutions of higher learning would consider A-level work -- is to make roughly 20 points a week, to contribute roughly 20 points per week.  That can involve putting the points together into a larger picture, which is much more fulfilling, but it doesn't need to.
What we know from working with "point clouds" in the field of Photogrammetry and computer mesh modelling for 3D and XR applications (something I teach in my courses) is that every point can be useful whether you are the person rendering the larger mesh result or not!

There really is "no point in putting off until tomorrow what you can do today" (i.e. no need to "procrastinate") because you really won't be "better off" tomorrow than than today since "getting better all the time" (as the Beatles sang) involves those habits, that practice, that wing-work. 
Make a habit of making points, of adding points and watch how the points add up!

Think of it like doing chin ups or push ups.  

If you do 4 chinups or four pushups  a day you will get much stronger much faster than if you wait until the end of the week and try to do 20.  Let's face it -- when it comes to chinups I'm betting most of you can't.  Well... I can't (the most I've ever done at one session is 10 in a row!).   

Procrastination is self-defeating, and since nobody is judging you in my courses, there really is no advantage to putting things off.  

 We don't "struggle" in my classes any more than most of  you would struggle to do four pushups each day rather than 20 once a week. But if you are really out of shape, let's use time rather than numbers -- if you spend 11/2 to 2 hours per day on each of your courses -- attending class, attending events, working on projects,  reading, researching, studying,  writing, creating, discussing, sharing - you won't burn out and you will be working at A-level performance. It's like those gamified self-paced language courses: If you study a language for 15 minutes a day you get fluent faster than if you put an hour in every week.  There doesn't have to be any struggle at all.  
If you do falter or slack off, you will have to invest more time in building that mental muscle but we want to encourage you NOT to cram!
My courses have no "quizzes" or "exams" or "tests" (unless you WANT them and DEMAND them! That is up to you) and no surprises.  Actually we ask YOU to surprise us -- we want you to be looking every day for something you find interesting that you want to share with the class. 
We want you to "make a point" by pointing out interesting information, problems and solutions in the sustainability space!
Try to do that every day, at least once a day, including around four points that you find worth sharing.
That is an easy route to an A!

Every Week:

We've found over three decades of experimentation with this Theory X and Z driven Platonic  "Maieutic Method" that either making an average of 20 points a week or investing 9-10 hours per week and documenting that journey is sustainable and can be anxiety and struggle free while still building your mental muscles and skillsets in ways that make put you in the top tier of performance when you bring your gifts to the so-called "outside world".

Our course is "gamified" and works a lot like one of those frequent flyer miles and more cards. We ask you to make 20 points a week so you can accumulate 320 points over the 16 weeks of the course. 
You can then trade those points for your "grade".  320 nets you an A plus, 90% of 320 an A-.  80% a B-, 70 % a C-.  You can choose your own grade just as you can choose how to spend your airline mileage points.  You are responsible for your final destination.

It takes about a paragraph for most human beings to make a valid point (that is why we have paragraphs in the first place, right? Each paragraph presents and supports  a single idea) so we are basically encouraging you, if you are writing, to create about 20 paragraphs of course related material per week. That is the equivalent of a 4 to 6  page paper single spaced per week.  If you are like me, you may prefer to make your points in notes and conversations each day and then string them together in a coherent "relational summary" paper or essay each week.  

If you are doing creative multi-media work then you string those notes and discussion/conversation results together into a larger creative project and you can also "bill us" for the time you invested, just like real artists do in the "gig economy" when figuring out the value of "piece work".
Simply try to produce some deliverable to share every week.

In my courses, if you work with other members of your team (which we highly highly encourage!) your "point cloud", added to that of others, will create emergent properties that should end up engaging you ever more deeply, just as when you start working on a jigsaw puzzle together with others you get more and more excited the more puzzle pieces are put in place and the big picture really starts to manifest!

Make a habit of checking in with all of us at least once a week to see that "big picture" and dip into the well of knowledge for sustenance and social support.  You should find the "struggle" vanishes and the collective consciousness takes over and taps into your ancient cooperative capabilities to be a creative and productive member of a community!

Just as many people go to church or temple or mosque or ashram each week to rejuvenate their spirit and community connections, think of checking in with everyone here each week to get that sustenance, feedback and support.

Semester Milestones:

Every 4 weeks (roughly once a month) you should post your "progress report" to the class on Canvas as a summary "bill with evidence" stating what you have been working on and linking us to your deliverables. They don't need to be "finished products"; we are interested in sharing the JOURNEY with one another.  
At the "midterm" we want to see how close each of us has gotten to making and sharing 160 points and to see HOW each of us chose to use those points creatively.  We want to share our essays and videos and artwork and music and poetry and 3d models and landscapes and games and research reports in a festival like atmosphere to draw inspiration from one another.

You are encouraged to work together in groups or teams; it is highly suggested, but in our courses we don't "mandate" or force anything. We model and encourage and let each of us use our free thinking intuition to guide our choices. In fact much of the course objectives to create a more sustainable and just world is to provide an environment of freedom and consensus building that is non-coercive, creating curricula "of the students and teachers, by the students and teachers, for the students and teachers!"

By the end of the semester we will have another "milestone" festival of sharing our creations.  There should be no anxiety, it is simply a chance to share your creativity and acumen with an attentive audience.  You can and do  make more points by participating but you never LOSE points -- however you make your points you trade them in for a grade so the choice of HOW to participate is yours.

Much like the practice of many indigenous peoples who figured out sustainability and justice long long ago we rely on "social suasion" to bring us all together for the sake of the team but wield no hierarchical "Discipline and Punish" prison power (see the work of French post-modernist philosopher Foucault for more on that!).

So that's it -- that is the Culhane "Instructor and Student Presence Plan".  We are here for each other and happy to elaborate.

Remember, you can reach me by email, by text message and personally during my office hours, but since we are sure that most of the questions you have will be somewhat generic and will have answers that could benefit EVERYONE in the course we ask you to ask your questions in our public discussion forums on Canvas, on Perusall and in our facebook groups. That way everyone can joyfully participate whatever tweaking or problem solving we need to do to make our presence in each others' lives as we work to solve the real existential problems of the world a joyous experience.  
Getting through the late anthropocene era and the earth's sixth and largest extinction crisis, with climate change and habitat loss casting dark shadows over all our futures is the real struggle.  When it comes to that struggle, we simply CAN NOT procrastinate!

But of course you all know that. That is why you came to study at the Patel College of Global Sustainability in the first place.  So let's get started.
We got each others' back!

Home Biogas: The Real "Common Core" that we need to Improve Education Standards

If there is one thing we ALL have in common -- and I mean ALL of us - all human beings, all animals, ALL of us -- it is that we all eat and excrete. And in the process ALL OF US generate "materials" -- "organic residuals" we in the sustainability space prefer to call them, things that are actually precious nutrient and energy rich  materials that usually go to waste and that thereby end up causing real problems -- often life threatening problems.  You know them as your own "food wastes and toilet wastes". 
But they need not, they SHOULD not be wasted.  And they SHOULDN'T be making a mess or hurting anybody. They are at the core of our biggest problems -- cholera, typhoid, dysentery, rats and roaches and other disease and disruption causing "vermin" (remember learning about the BUBONIC PLAGUE!).  But they can EASILY and SAFELY be rendered harmless and transformed into valuable fuel and fertilizer, and this transformation can be done AT HOME. It can be done at the local level.  It could be done and should be done at our SCHOOLS. This simple intervention and the know-how surrounding it, should be at the core of our solution set, too!

As a National Geographic Explorer and Professor at the Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida teaching circular economy/zero waste concepts as the director of our Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Program I am frequently asked what the most effective Drawdown Solutions are that we can implement in our own lives. I always turn to Drawdown Solution #3: "Eliminate food waste".  If food waste were a country, it is said, it would be the third largest emitter of the greenhouse gases causing anthropogenic global warming.  The contamination food waste and toilet waste cause form the core of our problems with contaminated materials that defy recycling.

 Schools could help solve this problem.  In a BIG way.  There is all this talk about "recycling not working" and "corporate greenwashing" and the public is understandably upset. Nobody seems to know what to do.  At the same time there is furious debate about what we should be teaching in our schools and endless handwringing about "standards" and the "COMMON CORE".

My answer is simple:  teach people how to end the threats posed by OUR OWN  "organic residuals" once and for all. Teach them how to completely eliminate their own food and toilet wastes, which are really wasted resources, and teach them how they, how WE, as so-called "consumers", can be part of the solution instead of always being blamed as the problem.

The fact is that so-called "production residuals" AND  "consumption residuals", which are often called "pre-consumer" and "post-consumer" wastes, when they are organic -- that is, all the wasted material we generate when we prepare our meals, and everything that results from the eating of those meals, from what you eat and what you don't, can be turned into value, not just through composting, which works but faces all sorts of restrictions -- you'll hear lasagna layer compost people insist you can't use meat and dairy, and vermiposting people telling you not to put in citrus or tomatoes -- but through biodigestion or "anaerobic digestion", which can effectively take ALL organic wastes with the sole exception of lignocellulose (branches and brown leaves and wood chips). In fact, it has been demonstrated that with a home or community biodigester you can turn all the "wet-wastes" into fuel and fertilizer and, by pouring the LIQUID COMPOST that comes out of a biodigester onto the yard wastes, accelerate their decomposition so that "everything once alive" can be returned to the soil or used to replace fossil fuels.

This isn't any longer a fringe thing, or a DIY thing or a "farm thing" or an "industrial thing".  I've been working with HomeBiogas, the visionary start-up based in Israel, since before they started, and a plethora of other commercial biodigester suppliers from India, China and Africa, for over 15 years. For all those years I've been a "biogas innoventor and practitioner" working with Universities and Governments and Non-Governmental Organizations and National Geographic as a thought-leader in this field, teaching folks through my own NGO "Solar CITIES Biogas Education" how to build their own systems from local materials in places as diverse as the Okavanga Delta in Botswana, to help end human/wildlife conflict, to high schools and colleges in Alaska, to understand better how to work in symbiosis with the microbial world to solve our trash problems.

Home biogas is a proven technology, and the commercial HomeBiogas units I go around the world installing, demonstrating and teaching about are ISO rated (ISO 23590) and CE listed. They come in a small pair of boxes that we've fit in a taxi and on the seat  next to us on buses throughout Israel and Palestine and Jordan, take only an hour or two to set up and need no special tools.

So why aren't we ALL doing it, since so clearly we all CAN?
 
As a science teacher at all levels, K-Adult, teaching around the world for 35 years (10 of them in the inner city schools of Los Angeles with "at-risk" youth) I have to blame the schools.  With all this talk over the decades about "standards" and "improving core competencies" we have somehow left out the true common core that unites us all -- our personal impact on our environments -- and the core competency we need to co-create a livable future -- the ability to easily transform our personal wastes from problem into solution.

While we have been bickering over how to teach "the three R's" -- "reading, wRiting and aRithmatic" -- we've obviously ignored any in depth or meaningful approach that helps students and citizens "Reduce, Re-Use, and Recycle".

Oh sure, we pay lip service to the concept.  Some schools valiantly set up recycle bins -- bins that inevitably overflow with dirty styrofoam clamshells and soiled paper plates and stinky goo-filled ketchup and mustard and mayo packets.  Nobody is convinced that recycling works (or rather they are being convinced that it doesn't by those who profit from current linear, "cradle-to-grave", waste-bin-to-landfill and toilet-to-waste-treatment-facility processes) , but students are always hopeful about the possibilities of a recycling economy  and usually upset that their "elders" don't seem to know how to design systems that would make for a guilt free cafeteria, kitchen and bathroom experience.  

Home biogas is a tangible, low-cost, highly effective way to give social proof to the technical concept of a circular economy, and it should not just be talked ABOUT and thought about in the schools (where most people have still never heard of it, even decades after teachers like me have gone out into the world like missionaries, apostles of the "gospel" -- "good news" -- of microbial transduction of "bads" into "goods") but DONE ABOUT.  

At the Patel College in Florida where I have been teaching people how to BUILD THEIR OWN home scale biogas systems for 3/4 of a decade, and at Mercy College, NY  before that, where I built what we believe to have been the first winter climate compatible INDOOR biodigesters the world had ever seen  back in 2012, we pride ourselves in being "not just think tanks, but DO tanks".

But most schools don't even teach about the uniquely effective and simple biodigester solution, much less implement it.

This is why we at our educational NGO Solar C3ITIES ("Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Industrial Ecology Solutions) and the team at HomeBiogas are working with school systems and lobbying to get the science and engineering of biodigester systems front and center as the  most effective  of STEM education initiatives and firmly positioned at the center of the COMMON CORE.

Over the past 15 years, running workshops around the world, building mini-digesters out of 5 gallon water jugs and paint buckets and Pickle Barrels with students and teachers in places as diverse as Eco-villages in Europe and  Bethlehem in Palestine and Punahou High and the Indigenous Community Center in Hawaii and Dublin Castle and the Men's Sheds to help the poor in Ireland, we've come to see biodigesters as what I call "THE SOLAR PLEXUS of THE FOOD/ENERGY/WATER NEXUS".
They are and should be the literal and figurative GUTS of any STEM education initiative because 

A)  Biogas is literally a form of accessible and useful SOLAR ENERGY and all units on renewable energy and solar energy can benefit from student understanding of how the sun's radiation starts the life cycle and produces a non-polluting biomass fuel that is endlessly recyclable.

B)  Biodigesters are inexpensive and can be built and deployed literally all over the planet to improve both public health and local economies, and satisfy all 17 of the UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs).

C)  Biodigesters sit at that nexus between biology, chemistry and physics married to the engineering of appropriate technology and  lend themselves to lessons in applied mathematics and computer design and  the creation of easy and safe labs that demonstrate human ingenuity and entrepreneurship. 

D) The task of explaining and raising awareness about Home biogas involves applied critical thinking, creativity, artistic and presentation skills. 

If there were ever any topic around which true "THEMATIC INTERDISCIPLINARY EDUCATION" could be developed, it would be Home Biogas.  It provides the launch pad for a curriculum about all the things we truly have in common.  It let's us "go with our gut".  It starts and ends with our guts. It connects the most up-to-date research into the magic of the microbiome with the early development of the first life-forms on earth.  It spans eons from the age of the Archaea, the alpha and the omega of life forms on our planet, through to the creation of a space-faring civilization, it connects the water and the land, it completes the cycle from what we grow to eat to what we eat to what results from our eating back to the soil where we grow what we eat.  Through this curriculum students always come spiraling up full circle to the unending circle of life as it extends out to the cosmos. 

Through deep reflection and lived experience about how our daily actions and interactions with food and the now-wasted residuals our consumption leaves behind, students can learn to truly feel like they are part of the solution rather than part of the problem and can develop realistic hope for the future. They can finally see that regardless of who we are or where or how we live we all share these common issues and interests surrounding the unnecessary and debilitating  problem of organic waste. We lose our fear of a growing population and stop thinking of our presence on this planet as a scourge. We learn that we can all make a POSITIVE difference with every meal, with every trip to the bathroom.

And so that is what we are developing -- the true common core of human experience for the .best common core curriculum to truly spread high standards for human and planetary health and well-being and education out into the world..   

I've got a gut feeling that this is the kind of education the world is really looking for.