Living Routes programs are integrated, academic experiences that truly honor our relationships to each other (community), the Earth (ecology) and ourselves (worldview). While the health and safety of our program participants is certainly our highest priority, and all our programs are clearly both academic and experiential in nature, the heart of Living Routes' transformative education lies in our commitment to the following core features and inquiries:

Ecological Literacy
A wise person once said, "It's easier to ride a horse in the direction it is going." If our intention is to change course, we should first understand the path we are traveling. For Living Routes, this means helping students understand our place in the story of evolution and the causes, trajectories, and speed of global crises such as climate change, peak oil, deforestation, population growth, desertification, and pollution. This also means equipping students with critical and systems thinking skills needed to acquire and process information, set priorities, and solve real-world problems.
     Key inquiry: What then?

Positive Solutions
While we must study and better understand local and global problems, there also comes a point when students "get it" and need to either respond directly or risk sinking into despair or, worse, becoming emotionally numb in an unconscious effort to defend their hearts against these seemingly insurmountable threats. Ecovillages offer students opportunities to literally bring their education to life and learn how they can make a positive difference in the world. Living Routes programs are immersive, authentic experiences where students can "be the change" and help develop real-life solutions. After spending time living and learning in an ecovillage, students can never again say, "It can't be done", because they see people wholly devoted to right livelihood, environmental justice, and creating a sustainable future.
     Key inquiry:How can I create positive visions for humanity and the planet and make a difference in my own life and in my own community?

Learner Centered
Living Routes aims to embody Lao Tzu's vision that "the best [teachers] are those who, when their work is done, [students] say 'We did this ourselves.'" Through small class-size and the use of Individualized Learning Plans, Authentic Assessment methods, regular check-ins, collaborative projects, and independent study options, students are encouraged to take initiative and control of their learning within the context of an academic program. This is a co-creative process where faculty are responsible for course content, yet are flexible in its delivery and responsive to the needs, passions, and learning styles of students. To paraphrase Yeats, we are less about "filling buckets" and more about "lighting fires" of inspiration and positive engagement with the world.
     Key inquiry: What am I passionate about?

Transdiciplinary
Real-life issues rarely exist within the "silos" of disciplines. For example, putting up a windmill requires expertise within the fields of appropriate technology, engineering, regional and community planning, governance, and possibly sociology and anthropology. Creating an organic farm crosses disciplines of agriculture, nutrition, land management, philosophy and ethics, business, education, and communications among others. While certainly able to educate specialists, ecovillages are uniquely positioned and equipped to train much-needed generalists who possess "lateral" rigor across disciplines to complement "vertical" rigor within disciplines. Living Routes therefore embraces an integrated pedagogy that strives to develop systems thinkers who can build bridges between local and global issues and among social, environmental, economic, and even spiritual spheres.
     Key inquiry: How can I live from a place of "interdependence" or "interbeing" with all things?

Environmental and Social Responsibility
Living Routes is committed to walking our talk by integrating sustainable practices into all of our program and office activities and giving back to the local communities that support our programs. This is too big a topic to cover in one paragraph, but details and examples can be found here.
     Key inquiry: How can I live well and lightly, both personally and professionally?

Community-Immersion
Despite being "hard-wired" to live in community, many of us in modern, "developed" countries have lost our sense of connection with others so thoroughly that our closest acquaintances are characters on TV shows. The sense of belonging - and place - that Living Routes' students experience within ecovillages both awakens and fulfills a need that many did not even know existed. And once nourished, it tends to expand to include ever-broader communities - both human and non-human.

Through co-creating group norms and structures for mutual support and accountability, students and faculty create collaborative "Learning" Communities within human-scale "Living" Communities that are developing new cultures - new stories - about how to live interdependently with all life. Engaging within this meaningful web of relationships provides endless, and often unavoidable, opportunities to grow beyond one's comfort zones and become known as a valued member within a sustainable community.
     Key inquiry: Where is my "tribe"? To what community do I belong and have responsibility?

Meaning-Making
Ecovillage members are typically "in process" and deeply engaged with big life questions. Students on Living Routes programs encounter many diverse worldviews, develop intercultural competencies, and have many opportunities to deeply and critically reflect on their own meaning making and "stories." Ecovillages are really more about "process" than "product." They function as chrysalises in which dominant "caterpillar" cultures are deconstructing and reforming into new, more ecological "butterfly" cultures. They are living laboratories in which today's youth and tomorrow's leaders are able to think - and act - outside of the box and experiment with new, more sustainable paradigms and worldviews. These are life-changing experiences.
     Key inquiry: What do I truly believe? How did I come to believe this? What are my options?

Service Learning
Service Learning is the integration of service and learning for the enhancement of both. Allowing students to engage in supervised, real-life projects within ecovillages is an essential way to help them understand and feel a part of the community. Through setting goals and meeting challenges, students build knowledge, practical skills, and a sense of personal and social responsibility. They also become more self-confident in their ability to be powerful change agents in their own lives and communities. And as Dr. Albert Schweitzer shared, "the only ones among us who will be really happy are those who have sought and found out how to serve."
     Key inquiry: How can I best serve the highest good?