The sustainability movement looks to policy, technology, and industry for solutions. While intergovernmentalagreements and energy infrastructure are important, a fecund approach to enhance our societal-scale effectiveness at tackling these problems is through investment in education. Which organizations are preparingour young people well for this challenge? How do we design the academic work in schools to engage students in solving real-world problems? At the periphery, where change often begins, we are inviting you to gather towitness one such model for education for sustainability in action, and share ideas on expanding the model.

At the heart of the model is a question that David Orr asks in his seminal essay on environmental education:What is education for? At Cape Eleuthera in February 2003 Dr. Orr explained that:

"…it strikes me that this place is a good bit about reinventing education. There is something new happening here. It’s happening
again at the periphery. And education ought to enable us to get tothe periphery so we can see the center more clearly. And there is
long precedent for going out into the wilderness and seeing the worldin a brand new kind of way…. A school can be a model of what we want to do in the world. It is at a scale small enough to get our mindaround, big enough to be significant. It is exciting to see a school define itself, as you have here at The Island School as a catalyst for all kinds of exciting things."

The Island School is testing and promulgating educational techniques and ideas in the following areas:• Research: student-led, team-based ongoing research tied to local needs and supported by Master’s students; moving the university model down to the high school level. The choice of projects is dictated by meetingthe needs of the school and the local community.

• Place-based curriculum: the locale is the textbook, and critical observation forms the basis of “knowing” and what it means to know and understand.
• Experiential education: students generate knowledge, they are not simply consumers of knowledge. They are crew, not passengers. Innovative approaches to assessment expand student skill and agency through a shared academic journey that has no pre-determined end or known content finding
• .Leadership: SCUBA, kayaking, research, and living together each demands the exercise of interpersonal skills and handling the real complexity of life in a team, as an implicated, connected whole.
• Teaching fellows: tapping into the vast demand for meaningful careers, along the Teach for America model.
• Master Teacher-in-Residence: engaging seasoned expertise to train young educators.

Goals of the conference

• To celebrate and showcase models of experiential education at Cape Eleutheraand elsewhere
• To gather together the thought leaders in the field to exchange ideas• To gather educators and practitioners to share stories and represent their organizations
• To energize support for young leaders beyond the classroom