LIFE Teacher Academy (LIFE TA) is a model that directly addresses teacher wellbeing and their sustained professional development necessary to transform today’s classrooms. LIFE TA is grounded in the Life Worth Living course developed at Yale University and further developed for educators through an Erasmus+ project: LIFE: Caring for Educator and Principals, both shown to increase a sense of meaning and purpose. The core purpose of the LIFE approach within the LIFE TA is to foster transformative learning processes by actively engaging with transformative pedagogical methods for pre- and in-service educators in five European countries and creating national and trans-national learning communities. These communities enable current and future educators to reflectively and critically engage with their own experiences, attitudes, values, beliefs, and assumptions. They learn to appreciate and interact with diversity, including gender, cultural, religious, personal, national, and philosophical perspectives. Through courses and training they are encouraged to, and supported in, conducting and participating in civic dialogue, conducive to personal transformation empowering them to act responsibly in the world.
LIFE TA engages 12 institutions from 6 European countries (IS, BG, BE, RO, IT, SP) which work in pre- and/or in-service educator training. Six partners draw from experience from the Erasmus+ project LIFE: Caring for Educator and Principals. LIFE TA extends previous LIFE work to pre-service and in-service educators forming two sustainable networks of practice which will help sustain the approach into the future and spread it more widely within and across education systems in Europe.
