Week 2 – Discovery

Welcome to Week 2 of our program! As we explore different topics together, in advance of setting up our teams and creating projects, we hope to provide you with activities and exercises that seek to expand your toolbox and offer various perspectives.

This week’s theme is Discovery; how we observe, reflect, think, and are attentive and receptive to our context. It entails a renewed sense of connection with what surrounds us and an increased sensitivity that can lead us to being better able to interpret the world and to contribute to it with new creations.

Reading between the lines

We all experience an almost incessant bombardment of stimuli, both in and out of school. Our attention is split amongst various sources of information that attempt to lure us in. It is important to become aware of how to “read between the lines”, as we used to say in the old days (there is no similar phrase for video).

Please watch the following three short videos:

TERRA 2050 Episode 2 – Humans from Christian Krupa on Vimeo.

TERRA 2050 Episode 3 – Technology from Christian Krupa on Vimeo.

TERRA 2050 Episode 4 – Hopes and Fears from Christian Krupa on Vimeo.

Answer the questions in the spaces provided:


Survey on Learning Styles

Please answer the following short survey on learning styles and preferences.

Click here to access the survey

To See More Clearly

It is always a healthy exercise to try to increase our “Awareness Bandwidth” in order to broaden our range of perception for a richer interaction with reality.

The following is a true story as told by photographer Tom Deifell:

I used to teach photography to blind and visually impaired students. One student made photographs of the cracked sidewalks at her school and sent them to the superintendent as “proof” of the damage. She included a letter asking for them to be fixed. “Since you are sighted,” she wrote, “you may not notice these cracks. They are a big problem since my walking cane gets stuck.”

One of the powerful messages in the story is that a lot of what we take for granted (in this story, our eyesight) may interfere with our perception. We invite you to engage in the following activity:

Go outdoors wherever you can spend some time and be safe and comfortable. Take your cell phone with you, but place it on silent mode if possible. Once you find what you think is an adequate spot, place yourself in a comfortable position and try to gradually quiet down and relax.

When you feel that you are at ease, pay attention to your surroundings. Try to perceive first what you would normally register through your senses. Then go one layer deeper and attempt to see, hear, smell, and touch in ways that would not have been immediately obvious. As in the story, try to discern those “cracks in the sidewalk” that your sight prevents you from detecting. If you can, move even beyond what you have perceived until then, and try to focus on other subtler details through your senses. Go as deep and as long as you feel.

Whenever you are ready, using your cell phone, take a photograph of what you have been observing. Then, before going back, if it is safe to do so, jot down what those “cracks in the sidewalk” were. Your notes can be a word, a phrase, a paragraph or a drawing. Send us the photograph and your notes to gabriel.rshaid@thelearnerspace.org.