Kathy and I are back on the road this morning. It will be Monday before I post again. I disconnect to reconnect. I feel on the edge at this time of the week and summer. I go back to work next Wednesday and, for the first time in my career, I am not looking forward to going back. I am on the edge and find faith in something other than me.
Each step
Brings me to the edge.
Uncertain balance
On the edge.
Instability dances with stability
Harsh with the gentle.
Quiet the self
Hear the soul’s gentle words.
A still space reveals wisdom
A spirit of Faith.
Look forward;
Look down.
Go forward
Accept hands proffered in similar Faith.
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, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Ivon,
I have had many summers where I stood at the brink of classes with unhappy feelings- not this year for some reason. But it’s okay. We feel what we feel.
I’m really going to try this year to bring my Zen beliefs into my teaching moments as much as I can. Maybe the thought of that is helping me feel good about teaching again.
I like the message here though- “Go forward.”
Thanks.
Tom
Thomas, thank you for the words of encouragement. When I get with the students, I think it will be OK.
Take care,
Ivon
We are so often on the edge, whether we know it or not – and that edge can bring incredible exhilaration and times of true refreshing as well as the knots of fear! I always tell myself that if I had 6 months to get ready for school, I still would have things to do. Sometimes we only need to start, to find that stepping off that edge is not as terrifying as it seems…
I agree. When I am with the students, it makes all the difference in the world.
It’s the staff meetings that drag… 🙂
Yes they do 🙂
An understandable viewpoint. You have been satisfying the inner you whilst traveling this path of the past short time. It would seem to me to be totally plausible to be thinking of remaining within this energy. However; it is only by living life in its myriad forms that we can appreciate the good, the bad and the ugly, so to speak. Enjoy the sense of wistful dreams while you may; tomorrow is a brand new day…!
And it was.