Have you or your faculty volunteered sabbatical time to create an inner city learning center for homeless children?... Or, stood for hours in ice cold water to work alongside a team of scientists studying a watershed in an Alaskan subarctic river ecosystem?... Or, lived and taught with Haitian teachers to create culturally based Creole texts for children who have never seen their native tounge in written form?... Or, invited students and their families to camp with you in the undeveloped southern portion of the Mesa Verda National Park, to photograph, record and plot ruins and rock art in a study of the prehistoric Anasazi?

These and hundreds of other opportunities exist for educators who want to experience cultures and environments which will enrich their lives and the life of their school.

Volunteering to Learn during a sabbatical not only renews enthusiasm for teaching, but it also provides new insights into the connections among academic knowledge, people and their worlds.

Where to look...

Earthwatch in Watertown, Massachusetts is a non-profit organization which offers individuals opportunities to work side by side with distinguished field scientists and scholars. The mission of this coalition of citizens and scientists is to improve human understanding of the planet, the diversity of its inhabitants, and the processes that affect the quality of life.

Since 1972, nearly 8,000 educators have participated in Earthwatch expeditions. For someone at your school, an Earthwatch adventure might be the culmination of a year’s sabbatical, or it might be the beginning of a year of personal and professional exploration. The Earthwatch K-12 Teacher Fellowship Program, which has provided grants for more than 3,000, might make a sabbatical adventure affordable.

Educators make up 20% of the volunteers who form EarthCorps teams. 150 diverse programs for 1996 offer opportunities which include:

• assisting scientists as they develop concepts of dolphin behavior in Hawaii, Monterey, New Zealand, China or Florida.

• spending time on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, collecting and identifying blue crab larvae, in an attempt to understand how to sustain this commercially and ecologically valuable species.

• becoming part of a team of cultural anthropologists studying the Chamacoco Indians of Paraguay, living in the village,observing and describing the daily activities of three different Chamacoco people and documenting behaviors and traditions.

• recording tales of magic in the isolated villages of Southwestern Russia, as part of a team who will be videotaping, audio recording and interviewing villagers about folklore which contains threads of both Russian Orthodox and pagan ritual. Teams will live in the villages, eat local food, and bathe in the traditional sauna-like bath-houses.

With sabbatical experiences like these, the world becomes the classroom. When teachers volunteer to learn, the world comes into their class-rooms and infuses their curriculum with the memories of people and places they will never forget.

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For information about Educator Fellowships for Earthwatch, call Dane Truesdale, (617) 926-8200 or write to him at the Earthwatch Education Office, P.O. Box 403 NE, Watertown, MA. 02272.

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