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Support fair trade and sustainable employment in developing countries. Ten Thousand Villages connects the stories and wares of world artisans with the North American marketplace.

Web site with great video about sustainability, annotated skript and other material for download http://www.storyofstuff.com/

"Introduction In recent years, the world has witnessed a growing wave of local initiatives in support of public schools. Teachers, cultural associations and civil society have been playing an active part in grassroots experiments aimed at helping schools in the creative elaboration of new educational methods, also exploiting information technologies. Here answers are coming from those directly faced with educational issues, in contrast with the more common top-down reforms, where experts' committees draw up didactic experimentation plans to be put forward to willing teachers. Experiments like that are often very effective but, unfortunately, they rarely get known beyond the immediate sphere of their promoters. Moreover, they tend to be short-lived because promoters don't have the strength to sustain them and a suitable supporting network is lacking. They are like drops in the ocean: they apparently cannot change the entire educational system. But the ocean of whole human community could be flooded by many such contained experiments that would transform it, if the most meaningful of them could be fostered, spread and developed. ..."

"I have always believed that reading has a significant impact on our understanding and appreciation of the world. As both a life-long passionate reader and an experienced English Language Arts teacher, I have witnessed first-hand the impact that reading has on the ability of learners in terms of comprehension, grammar, empathy, confidence, vocabulary and expression. This has however, only ever been phenomenological through informal observations in the classroom, and in an effort to incorporate sustained silent reading (SSR) as a regular, valid and essential practice, I have embarked upon this research in order to determine the impacts that daily reading has on middle-school learners, not only in terms of English Language Arts, but also across the curriculum."