Agavi: Offline Digital Learning for Ukraine

Greetings all,

I hope this message finds you well.  As you know, the war in Ukraine is still raging.  However, with the west remaining calm (which is where our colleagues live and work), we are proceeding with launching a new virtual program with our faculty contacts there.  Greenworks is an environmental education and impact program we have been successfully running in Indonesia for the past couple of years.  In this program, students learn how to design, implement, and evaluate their own small-scale projects that address an environmental issue they have identified in their community.  We are completing the pilot run of a "project/mission development" curriculum in Brazil at the moment and will be integrating an updated version of this curriculum with the community projects in a pilot run in Ukraine in a few weeks.  Our goal is to develop an exchange network between students and teachers in Ukraine, Indonesia, Brazil, and the US to create grassroots change on urgent environmental issues.  This is the first step.

In addition to providing students with an active learning curriculum and funding to implement their projects, we will also be training teachers in classroom approaches to help manage and support this active learning curriculum.  Part of classroom modernization is improving how teachers teach.  So while our ability to operate in Ukraine is limited, we can still help improve teaching approaches while we await our in-person return.

With gratitude,

Lev