In 2011, Steve Leeper, Chairman of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation and a director of the Hiroshima International School introduced Walter Enloe and Serene Enloe to the Green Legacy Hiroshima project. Walter, a teacher, grew up in Japan and for years was Principal of Hiroshima International School and the co- founder of the 1000 Cranes Club with Steve. Serene, a teacher, was born in Hiroshima and attended the International School. Together, father and daughter, invited the Avalon School in St. Paul and advisor Jo Sullivan, a childhood friend of Steve, to become the first North American institution to join the project. In the summer of 2015 Serene returned to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sister-city of St. Paul, to photograph the surviving Peace Trees of Hiroshima. Over the past five years the students have experimented with various seeds and discovered that the only trees to thrive at Minnesota’s latitude is the venerable Ginko. On June 6, 2017, Peace Day at Avalon, they distributed their first trees to peace parks and public spaces throughout the region. Like the founding of the 1000 Cranes Club over thirty years ago, students reach to their locale and the world to share their fervent desire for peace through working to contribute to a world that values justice and equity for all peoples, and sustainable environments for future generations. These roles of active citizen and earth steward are a hallmark of the Avalon School community.
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This special volume on the experiences and examples of language teaching and cultural immersion from the Concordia Language Villages (CLV) was created as a project honoring the founding and development of the Villages over fifty years ago. Inspired as parents and educators by the Villages and the transformational experiences of our own four children (Isaac, Serene, Jeffrey, and Luke), we wanted to share the impressive and extensive background of this experiment in global understanding with larger world audiences. It is an example made even more poignant and important by events in Europe and elsewhere in these difficult years of the early 21st century.
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