Deep River provides consulting services for the design, development, and delivery of learning experiences for a broad range of audiences and needs. This is the Deep River vision: education through inspiration, curiosity, creativity, and fun.
Why? To make the world a better place by inspiring people to learn, love, and live through creative and meaningful experiences that connect them to their community and world.
I’m Terry Burton, the Chief Learning Officer at Deep River. I’ve worked in a wide range of communication and education fields, in diverse corporate, small business, educational, and nonprofit settings, for over 30 years. I am a driven innovator and explorer with a proven ability to initiate and design change. Passionately curious and dedicated to connecting people and ideas, my work includes designing informal education experiences that matter, creating inquiry- and project-based learning environments, teaching filmmaking and immersive image making, and documentary filmmaking for social and environmental justice issues.
As Learning Experiences Manager at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, I directed a team of educators in designing, developing, and delivering engaging, effective, and fun experiences for kids and adults. I introduced and implemented progressive educational philosophies, tools, and processes, creating a new framework that “baked in” priorities such as:
- Grounding all our work in “why” first: why are we doing this? Why is this important? Why will our participants find this valuable?
- Supporting and encouraging inquiry, rather than being a one-way “information dump”
- Building learning opportunities to develop and practice 21st century skills such as collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking
- Encouraging a growth mindset where all learners felt competent, safe, and willing to try new things
- Project-based learning
- “What it does is more important than what it is”: understanding that the highest learning goal is inspiration, not just the imparting of facts and knowledge
- Leveraging unique institutional and community resources
I have a particular interest in storytelling as a tool for learning, advocacy, and, basically, saving the world. I am an accomplished documentary filmmaker and have taught documentary filmmaking and immersive image making to adults, high school students, and younger kids. I was the driving force behind the OtterBox Digital Dome Theater at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, and set the course for this amazing resource to become a creative incubator where artists can create their own stories and share them with the community.