To help formal and non-formal educators learn from each other and pass on creative and effective ways to teach biomimicry, the Sharing Stories Project was born. The project’s interviewers reached out to educators across the globe who are using biomimicry to engage young people in solution-based thinking and inspire them to look at the natural world from a new perspective. They asked questions to understand how teaching biomimicry can support science standards, as well as other subjects; how it supports environmental literacy; what successful strategies, resources, and materials are being used; and what other needs, if any, exist in biomimicry education.
The 14 stories featured in the Sharing Stories Project show that amazing things are happening with biomimicry in classrooms and other places of education around the world!
When you read them, you will learn about an educator in Singapore organizing guided nature walks for adults and young people to experience and learn how nature solves problems. Another story illustrates an educator’s use of biomimicry in her special science programs in the Netherlands, and we also learn from a secondary educator in India teaching biomimicry as an elective subject. You can find inspiration from a story about how bullet train engineer, Eiji Nakatsu, visited and talked with a first-grade class in Thousand Oaks, California, and how a group of young people in Rhinebeck, NY interested in biomimicry met together every Sunday night for five months and won the Biomimicry Youth Design Challenge middle school division. Explore these and many more stories from creative individuals.
The Biomimicry Institute would like to thank the Sharing Stories Project committee members Catherine Rassat, Hugo Araujo, Kristen Nordstrum, Rob Gilson, and committee chairs, Sherry Ritter and Dorna Schroeter for the interviews they carried out, the articles they wrote, and their tireless reviewing and editing. We also want to thank all of the educators who took time to be interviewed and provide feedback and materials.
