|
“Man must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good…. These precious things are conveyed through personal contact with those who teach and not – or at least not in the main – through text books. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture.” |
 |
|
FOUNDATION COURSE Level I
Education, like all other aspects of life, functions as an ecosystem with each aspect impacting all others. This is true whether we attend to it or not; the only issue is whether we will work consciously with it so the child’s whole experience is in service of our educational goals and we all have a sustainable and healthy experience.
 |
|
Any Ecosystem has principles that cannot be ignored or violated without paying a high price. For plants, one could say that it is the interaction of sun, water, soil (type and life), and nutrients that make up the Ecosystem. All plants work with these elements – not all in the same way, but all must work with them. Picture what happens when we speed up the fruiting of vegetable plants – chemical fertilizers, herbacides, and pesticides impact the natural ecosystem; the impact is there whether we pay attention or not. The same is true in education; when worked with harmoniously, the core principles create a self-sustaining and vital system that serves health and well being for all
.
Just as different plants must work with these underlying principles differently if they are to reveal their true nature, the same is true in education. In this course, we work to uncover each student’s unique outlook on education and explore how she or he can better manifest that vision through understanding of the principle of ecosystems. We do this through study of the Enki Web – the underlying structure of the Enki Education ecosystem using it as a tool to look at educational ecosystems in general.
Click here for details on this live-online course
No approach to teaching, however brilliant or effective, will ever be more important than the individual teacher’s ability to hear and act upon his own intuition. It is intuition that must guide the teacher’s moment-to-moment work so that it is a creative and genuine response to the needs of his students. Without intuition and the teacher’s genuine connection to his work, any and all approaches become dogma.
 |
|
In this course, which is the cornerstone of the Enki approach, participants will be introduced to observation techniques and artistic and meditative disciplines that can be used to develop direct perception first of themselves, and then of the child. These disciplines take us from the realm of concepts and ideas into our own direct experience of the child’s world – and our own.
Through stories, visual and movement arts, and conceptual study, we will explore some of the ways people have described human nature and the learning process. These include work with the Buddha Families, Sensory Learning Styles, and Goethean Picture Building.
Participants will be introduced to ways to use these descriptions to tease apart and uncover further questions, deepen perception and spark their own insight. This, in turn, helps us to open perception and meet ourselves anew. We approach the deep personal growth work that is inseparable from seeing anew, in both a playful and a thoughtful manner. One person will be challenged as they see the ways their kinesthetic sense has been shut down; another as they discover how often they walk out on their deep nature; another as they sit face to face with how deeply connected they are. Anything is possible in this very individual and personal exploration of the ways we block access to our own intuition, and in the ways we already hear and follow its call. This workshop is designed for those who want to delve into their own process and meet themselves anew.
The tools introduced during this workshop are practiced on a regular basis throughout both summer intensives.
Click here for details on this 3 day, inperson workshop
Embodiment and Invocation
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like but you will have to leap. – W.H. Auden
The cornerstone of the Enki approach is experiential education. This can mean many things to many people. For us it means that all learning begins with jumping into direct experience without agenda. To do this, we must rediscover and cultivate the openness of the young child, who is imprinted by experience like the wet sand yielding to each footstep. His experience is not blocked by emotion, opinion, or judgment. For adults, who have learned to step back, weigh, and judge before leaping into unknown territory, this journey into the world of the young child is a journey into a strange and foreign land.
 |
|
This is not a matter of believing, liking, or agreeing with the experience being offered; quite the opposite. It is a matter of each participant having his own direct and intimate experience from which will arise a full array of emotions, opinions, and understandings.
When we start with open experience as our base, all of these reactions are expressions of the participant’s own wisdom and perception. He has been left free to have direct experience uncolored by the expectations, intentions, or understanding of others. His experience – and the conclusions he draws from it – are his own. For both child and adult, this is the core of experiential learning. And it is becoming at home in this learning process that is the all important skill for the teacher.
In this is an 8 day, in person Intensive, we work with the full learning process as the ground of all courses in this intensive. This process of “leaping in” includes work with artisitic movement activities to integrate the reflexes and the senses, work with embodied storytelling, and exploration of how this impacts teaching through the grades. All this is anchored in work with mindfulness meditation. We join together in the simple, non-sectarian meditation practice of bringing attention to our moment to moment experinece, on a regular basis. Applying the attitude learned through this, participants work with movement, speech, recorder, painting, and academic study as opportunities to explore their own learning process.