On The Ground With Communities of Practice

In addition to developing online materials for distribution, the Flying University Project also visits people in poorer neighborhoods and marginalized communities for on-site, person-to-person teaching.  We now have four teams visiting sites on weekday evenings in Portland, Oregon in order to teach, and we have a fifth team that is focusing on writing and developing educational materials.

We believe that a proper education in the years to come will include the following essential elements:

• A sound grasp of math and basic science, 
• The creativity, imagination and mental agility to apply the knowledge of math and basic science to a variety of problems to come up with unique solutions.

Pictured above is an example of such a solution, namely, a variant of the zeer or pot-in-pot evaporative refrigerator developed by Mr. Mohammed Bah-Abba of Nigeria.  This device is a simple, extremely low-tech solution to the problem of food preservation in northern Nigeria.  For his work in developing and spreading this solution, Mr. Bah Abba received a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2000.  One of our teaching teams is leading students through a series of science activities designed to expose them to the kind of low-impact, appropriate-tech, creative thinking that leads to solutions like the zeer pot refrigerator.  A teacher from that team will be creating science lessons to add to our Resources, so we will have an additional Resources tab for science.

And our team may soon be expanding its offerings to include instruction in language arts, composition and grammar, so we may soon be adding a Resources tab for language arts.  Stay tuned...