Section 8: TRACK 1

Track 1: Home and Community-Based Education

Alternative learning communities are thick with examples of cognitive growth nurtured by everyday living experiences. As we evolve toward recognition of our inextricably intertwined interrelatedness, these examples offer clear evidence that a whole-life approach to learning is richly successful. In this track we will share stories, ideas and practices of learning in which our intrinsic interconnectivity is the underlying core belief.

Other Tracks in this Section

• Track 2: Learning Compassion
• Track 3: Higher Education
• Track 4: Teaching and Learning
• Track 5: Schools for Children

Carol Toben

Travels, listens, reads, writes, hikes, and volunteers in Tucson, Arizona and around the world. She has worked as an instruction assistant with Rita Marie Johnson at the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica, lectured on home schooling in China, served as a Unity spiritual leader, a mother, a homeschool teacher, and as an engineer in the semiconductor industry. She holds an MDiv from Claremont School of Theology and a BSEE from the University of Illinois.

Harrison Smith

Harrison Smith is interested in the theory and practice of education that honors the whole of children’s humanity. He is completing his Master’s of Education at University of Arizona and has a Bachelor’s of Science in Environmental Science. He co-founded a democratically run school in Phoenix at the age of 20, and since then has worked with kids in formal to informal settings, teaching Calculus, planting seeds, collaboratively building life-size science simulations, and exploring the wild. He believes our best hope in solving our world’s emerging crises is in listening to and empowering young people.