Life Worth Living: Caring for our Educators and Principals (LIFE) is a personal development experience that is different from anything you have done before because it is rooted in the belief that there is no professional development without personal development. We invite you to join this journey.

During LIFE we invite you to become part of a cohort of teachers and principals who will be given a moment to pause, consider fundamental questions of life, to share and to listen with others, to gather your thoughts, so that you are empowered to know more clearly what matters in your life. Life Worth Living is a journey in which you will excavate/uncover and clarify the sense of meaning and purpose in your life through self-reflection, engagement and critical self-questioning.

There are seven partners in the LIFE project and the main goal is to train a total of 10 facilitators (two from each country) in the content, approach, and relational pedagogy of Life Worth Living. This comprehensive training will equip them to effectively plan and lead two in-country training retreats for teachers and principals in their respective languages, as well as the final international retreat. The facilitators will also play a crucial role in continuing capacity-building efforts for teachers and principals, and in expanding LIFE communities within their countries. This will contribute to enhancing well-being within the education profession and bringing about positive changes in schools and students through cultural and pedagogical transformations. Each partner organization will utilize a Facilitators’ Manual for future training sessions, which will be accessible on the LIFE project’s digital platform.

LIFE aims to increase the well-being of educators and principals by increasing their sense of meaning in life. For far too long the weight of changing societal needs has been on the shoulders of schools, specifically educators and school leaders. This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic and became glaringly obvious during the pandemic, when it was demanded of schools to transform themselves overnight amidst global fear and uncertainty. Educators rose to the challenge across the world as they learned new technologies and worked hard to manage their own anxieties and families while continuing to provide calm and stability for all of their students. Now as the pandemic continues to recede, the weight on educators has only increased. Faced with the aftermath of the effects of COVID-19, schools and educators are observing students with high levels of anxiety, depression and ongoing absenteeism. There are calls from all nations for schools and educators to care for the mental well-being of the students who are suffering. While the situation for students is serious, the lack of care and focus for the wellbeing of the adults in schools, who are called upon to support the students, is glaring. As bell hooks has argued, educators cannot facilitate holistic student transformation if they themselves are not whole.