Tergar Schools creates K–12 schools that foster kind and resilient human beings who embody awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy.
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A Children’s Day Gift to the Earth: Climate Learning and Compassion at Tergar Schools
“What is the difference between climate and weather?” That was the first question Navina Deshar, Senior Program Manager at Himalayan Environment and Life Protection (H.E.L.P.), put to our senior boys in Grades 5, 6, and 7 on Children’s Day. It opened a conversation that felt especially close to home this year. Less than three weeks
Seeds Taking Root: How the Tergar Schools Model is Growing in Tergar Charity Nepal Classrooms
When a few children in Samagaun told their teacher they couldn’t make anything, she didn’t insist. She took them outside. Together they gathered leaves, stones and twigs from the mountainside, carried them back into the classroom, and began to build. “After that, they became excited and joined in freely,” says Usha Gurung, Head Teacher at
Guiding Principle
The view that all beings are imbued with kindness and resilience guides everything we do. Our path of learning is a holistic and experiential process. We recognize these inherent qualities, unlock their potential, and embody them for the welfare of all.
Mission
Based in the vision of Mingyur Rinpoche, Tergar Schools creates K–12 schools that weave together Buddhist view, meditation, and application with contemporary fields of study. We employ innovative teaching approaches that foster curious and creative learners who thrive in and contribute to a complex, interconnected, and changing world.
Overview
Learning Approach
The Buddhist Experience Curriculum (BEC) teaches Tibetan Buddhist practices and principles, emphasizing the inherent goodness of all beings and progressing through the themes of Awareness, Love and Compassion, and Wisdom, culminating in a joyful school ethos.
Our curriculum explores each topic through three traditional Buddhist elements: view, meditation, and application. This framework encompasses the cognitive, affective, and nonconceptual forms of knowing, where the view refers to learning; meditation involves experiential learning of awareness, compassion, wisdom, and joy; and application is about putting the learned topics into practice in daily life.
Our curriculum provides learning that 1) emerges through lived experience; 2) is explored through contemplative practices; 3) is inquiry-based; and 4) emphasizes daily-life application.
Our integrated academic curriculum is based on the view of basic goodness, and it encourages exploration and discovery in classrooms. We utilize real-world examples and aim to scaffold knowledge and skills that are relevant to students’ lives. This is done through a series of spiraled topics and units that are integrated in nature, emphasizing four baskets: communication, culture, environment, and design.
