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Solitude

I cannot play the flute, but there is something enchanting and beautiful when we watch the sun rise and bid farewell to the stars. Several years ago, just after dawn I watched several deer grazing on a golf course. It was too early for anyone else to be up and nothing else moved in the softness of the early morning.

Hortus Closus

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When I am alone at
Dawn, I feel alive. The wind,
The stars are my friend.

I play the flute as I watch
The rising sun. I’m serene.

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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 and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.

5 responses »

  1. I play the flute.
    Leslie

    Reply
  2. My experience is that teachers are some of the most unacademic stuck in the mud people around. They’ve earned their degree, do their teaching job and never expand beyond that. For those it really is a good idea for the state to require them to take at least 6 credit hours for license renewal every five years. Older teachers hate those faculty workshops but they need them but most just endure without the slightest intention of learning and modifying. And populations have shifted and changed with the times and immigration and technology and little attachment to past few decades make the old ways, ideas and grade assessments incongruent with the present. They never seem to get it.

    Reply
    • I am board with you Carl. I retired when I realized I was running the risk of not enjoying what I did with students. Being in the classroom with students is invigorating and challenging. It is a vulnerable space and worth while. You are right when you point to how much teaching has changed. It is all about work and labor rather than ethical action.

      Reply

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