About Trena
Trena Noval co-leads Our Changing Planet; is cofounder of Bay Area Integrated Design for Education, the Arts, and Leadership (IDEAL), a new organization whose mission is to foster innovative teaching and learning through integrative creative practices that cultivate liberatory learning spaces; and, along with veteran educator Ana Raquel Thomas, is a cofounder of Creativity Lab, a new science and environmental literacy project. Trena is an artist, educator/activist, and writer, whose work engages participatory research, cross-disciplinary platforms, learning pedagogies, and community engagement. At the heart of her interests is the investigation of social and natural ecologies—relationships of people and place with a focus on justice, the environment, and creative actions. Trena’s work in education has focused on integrated learning practices and pedagogies in program design and leadership development in both public and nonprofit educational sectors, creating communities of practice that engage liberatory spaces for learning. She is one of the founding faculty of the Integrated Learning Specialist Program, where she developed principal and teacher leadership initiatives and supported integrated learning demonstration sites across the county. In collaboration with UC Berkeley Principal Leadership Institute, she is a co-lead for a leadership research initiative that examines school leaders who practice leadership through integrated learning pedagogies. She serves on the board of directors for Youth Art Exchange, and she is a member of the 2019/2020 Stanford Arts Institute's Creative Cities Working Group. Trena teaches at California College of the Arts.
For the last 15 years, we have collaborated to create standards-aligned integrated learning models for environmental literacy and the arts in order to support issues of justice. Using these models in the classroom has ignited our students’ imaginations. In early August 2020, as we approached an uncertain school year, we sat down to reflect on […]
Environmental justice IS community building. They go hand in hand. And when we include all people and perspectives, we bring creativity and learning to our practice and world. ~Our Changing Planet teacher At 22, our first US Youth Poet Laureate, Amanda Gorman, has given us wisdom to live by: We don’t burst into a new […]