Reflection with our Japanese Partners

We returned to Tokyo to meet up with the 47 Japanese teachers we had met in San Francisco. Our meeting goal was to share our educational experiences in Japan and the US in order to promote better practices in ESD. Our hope was to forge partnerships between the two countries to better understand each other and ourselves. We were asked to write down our most significant findings from our Japan Fulbright Teacher Exchange for ESD. I wrote: 1) It takes a whole community to create and sustain the effort to educate for ESD – farmers, teachers, parents, business, government AND children. 2) We must first teach the children to love the earth and each other. 3) We must shift our current assumptions of how the planet works and how each of us connect to the earth. My friend, Freya from Tennessee, wrote, “thinking in systems creates space for sustainability”. Hiroshima wrote that we must set clear goals and definitions. We must think positively.