CIRAL's Influence on Evergreen

What is CIRAL’s role within The Evergreen State College?  Evergreen is already an institution known for its alternative approach to education.  CIRAL is being developed at the same time that Evergreen is re-examining its  educational goals and looking towards the future.  Both Transforming Institutions and Experimental Schools hold the ideal of a college that pushes the boundaries of how education has been approached in the past.  Teaching to Transgress speaks to pushing the boundaries of institutions as repositories of knowledge that students come to glean towards a model of a place where students come to develop skills essential for the future.

Service Learning, Citizenship Schools, and Education and Values, are all helpful models for examining how this goal can be accomplished.  With several active projects engaging differing communities with different types of work, a wide range of students would be able to learn about their desired field in real world settings.  By working with communities outside college walls students become active citizens and develop a lifelong interest in bettering the civic sphere.  Sharing the work done in this experimental education model in Open Access Scholarly Publishing would be a good avenue for sharing success and presenting it to the broader academic community and beyond.