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 
Indeed, I need to be understood and heard.
We each do.
I understand this to some degree.
My question is, if we are on a spiritual path, see the need to give and support the needy, but what do we do with the masses narcissistic behaviour.
America is self centred, a cares little except themselves.
How do you embrace the world like this.
Hospitals who act like they care deeply at treatment will garnish a families wages six months later and render them homeless.
I find little compassion and much suffering in my little Oregon town.
It is disappointing to watch people behave so selfishly.
I was reading David Loy today and many of those thoughts and questions arose as I read. It is no easy journey, but perhaps it is the challenges that make it rewarding
Researched David Loy a bit, interesting, Zen mixed with social behaviour, ethics.
He has many books, please recommend and describe how you see him?
I have just begun to read him and the book I began with is “The World is Made of Stories.” Several authors I am using for my dissertation quote him about the ethics of teaching. What I read in this first book makes me want to read more.
Thanks
Happy New Year! I’ll be counting on you.
Thank you. Have a wonderful 2015.