I attended a retreat based on Parker Palmer’s thinking and writing this past weekend. This quote summarizes the importance of relationships and lifting the other from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Laura Flett's avatarIt Started with a Quote

If we want to grow as teachers — we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives — risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
― Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life

Consider that we are all teachers…and learners.

What are my personal experiences, fears and dreams?  What is my inner life?  Am I sharing it with others?

I talk, and listen, to myself, practicing in the safety of my journal.

Laura, it’s time.

Here’s a bit of sharing…My after school kids playing darts in the Number Games class.

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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

3 responses »

  1. This sounds like profound stuff Ivon. I attended a conference a long time ago that dealt with this type of deep approach, but it was more focussed on the kids and their inner landscapes. It changed me forever. It would be nice to discover how this changes you (over time, of course-I realize the implications are felt over time).

    Reply
    • I will happily share as time moves on. This is based on the writing and thinking of Parker Palmer. We spend considerable time reflecting on our leadership, sharing what emerges, and writing. It is intense but today I felt so good with the students.

      Reply
  2. Making the connection is so powerful in teaching and every other relationship in life. Respect. Openess. Vulnerability. Oneness. Love. Especially love. When students know that their teacher loves them, a space can be created for miracles to happen. For some, it may the first time that they’ve experienced the care of a loving adult.

    I’m glad that you have chosen not to hide behind technical distant abstractions.

    Russ

    Reply

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