FIRST KISS

One of the activities we facilitate in Teach Earth Action professional development workshops with faculty is called “First Kiss.” Participants are asked to delve into their memories and recall their First Kiss...

• with their discipline. Faculty are asked to think about the first time they really fell in love with, felt a deep connection with, felt moved by, their academic discipline. 

• with the planet. Faculty are asked to think about the first time they really fell in love with, felt a deep connection with, felt moved by, planet Earth. 

• with teaching. Faculty are asked to think about the first time they really fell in love with, felt a deep connection with, felt moved by, working with students. 

Participants write for 15 minutes, capturing the details of the First Kiss. (For many folks 15 minutes isn’t nearly enough time!) Then the stories are shared out, first in small groups, then with the whole group. The stories are always very moving, funny, insightful.

Fascinating and beautiful trends emerge. In the case of academic discipline, here are just a few: faculty recall feeling lost then ‘found’ by their discipline; the First Kiss was serendipitous, the result of a chance encounter; some teacher pushed or inspired them to dig into the discipline; some teacher’s sheer energy and passion for the discipline created the Kiss; faculty realized they were ‘good’ at the discipline and “can not get enough of it.”

After all the stories are shared, these follow-up questions naturally arise: 

• How can the spirit, power, beauty, and inspiration of a First Kiss be brought into the classroom? 

• How can the trends we see in First Kiss inform our teaching?

Many faculty ruefully report that they don’t recall EVER feeling the power of the First Kiss inside their own curriculum. As one History teacher said, “I realize I fell in love with the passion and excitement of History, not all the dates and place names that I have to cover.”

As a follow-up activity, faculty work together to design classroom experiences that leverage First Kiss. Using TEA Design principles, faculty very quickly and with great creativity create the conditions in the classroom that make it so students experience their own First Kiss with the discipline the teacher loves so much, or with the planet.

Faculty report that they have tried First Kiss back in their own classrooms with their students. (When the activity is done with students, you can adjust it: students can think about the first time they recall falling in love with Learning itself.) First Kiss works well in this setting too. It serves as an inquiry tool for faculty, as they gain insight into what factors inspire students to fall in love with the earth and learning that can critically impact the survival of the earth. It also works very well as a Meta-cognitive exercise; students hear each other’s stories and tease out trends in learning they can apply to their own experience and as they position themselves in relation to their own learning.