The Rocky Mountains as seen from the YMCA of the Rockies, Estes Park, Colorado, August 19, 2012

This is a view from the YMCA of the Rockies, which I first visited in August, 1975 to attend my first conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP). Since then I’ve been here about 15 times.

But it was my attendance at the (AHP) conference that changed my outlook as a teacher at Georgia State University.

I attended AHP conferences for the next decade and through that association participated in AHP’s first Soviet-North American Exchange program. Through these professional exchanges among teachers, professors, and psychologists, we established a lasting educational program which became the Global Thinking Project (GTP). The GTP was one of the first Internet-based collaborative project that capitalized on the emerging field of telecommunications.

Russian and American teachers, working with scientists, science educators, and administrators, invented, designed, field-tested, and implemented an ecological program where students investigated through inquiry environmental problems at the local school level, and used the GTP website to exchange and share data, findings and conclusions to become citizen scientists.

Begun as an exchange among adult professionals, the GTP, through funding from the Russian Academy of Education, the United States Information Agency, Georgia State University, and the Eisenhower Program, we were able to carry out exchanges among middle and high school students from Russia and the U.S. These exchanges, which occurred between 1987 – 2000, brought together hundreds of teachers and students. During this period schools from Australia, the Czech Republic, Spain and other countries joined to create a global network of schools.

Begun in the Rockies, the GTP fostered team work, collaborative learning, ecological study, inquiry, and empowerment.

The Rockies at dusk from the porch of a cabin in the mountains, August 23, 2012.