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
Seek Moments of Solitude (via www.jonathanhilton.com)
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
First thing in the morning I try to meditate. It has become a habit, and I would feel lost without it.
I still struggle with the regularity of practice, but I find myself stopping daily and just finding my breath. I am making small steps of progress.
I really enjoyed this post – thanks for reposting it. I find that I do much better if I have some solitude every day. Without it, I get really cranky and feel very oppressed.
Nancy
I know the feeling Nancy. We need that space for our gentle spirit to appear.
I fear for the younger generation that does not even know what this is.
I agree Angeline. It began before this generation. I know adults who struggle to find the solitude we each need to lead a full life.
I have been lucky enough to spend most days in solitary bliss over the last 3 years and I can assure you it is essential to my mental health & wellbeing, but like Angeline, I fear for the younger generation that are glued to their iPods, iPads and mobile phones etc – they don’t know how to be alone, silent and just wholly in the presence of themselves. They don’t know how to do any task mindfully. They only know how to process tasks on the way to somewhere else.
Victoria, I do too fear for the young people. Many of them seem to have no one guiding them in their use of technology. Each day, in my classroom, I witness their inability to choose just to be for a few minutes and disconnect.
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