Kathy took this picture while we walked along Waterton Lake’s beach. She thought it would inspire me. I wondered what might emerge. Last night, I scribbled ideas into my journal about wisdom and its sources. I enjoy and enjoyed listening to stories told by my parents, Kathy’s parents, our grandparents about life in past generations, and many others I come in contact with each day.
Flotsam on the shore
Washed up and unusable
Life’s wisdom wasted.
Polished piece of wood
Fine tuned by life’s travails
Reveals the wisdom.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Lovely words – life can be sandpaper – but polishes our inner beauty to a shine!
We learn best from the things we bump against.
So true, Ivon!