a dictionary of true mirages bird songs instead of geometry plus a clock with no hands many very magic felt pens words like primrose or rainbow painted on a huge whiteboard come into the roofless Sā¦
Source: Roofless School
John Dewey suggested education is not preparation for life, but life itself. The poem, Roofless School, extends that metaphor to poetry.
Poets sit under the sky and experience the world in the most complete ways, but their poetry is subject to diverse interpretations. When I go back and read a poem, I find new meanings.
Each time we experience the world, we experience something new. Regardless of how familiar it seems to be, an experience can only be experienced once, in the moment I experience it. We re-experience the experience retrospectively and find new meanings in a new, reflective experience.
When I taught, I tried to begin each day fresh. It was not erasing the past, but I realized how the past informed my relationships with students, curriculum, and digital technology in the present moment. In those moments, being mindful and sensitive was paramount.
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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.
Teacher as Transformer 
I like that idea because we never stop learning especially through life experiences.
Leslie
It is important to be mindful and attentive to each step.
Growing up, I had several good teachers. But also, and doubtless a product of the times, I was often forced to choose between education and life. Education in stifling rooms where I was forced to sit for hours on end vs. life outside where nature was my most patient, enduring teacher. Still is, despite all my years of ‘education,’ in the end š
I found it interesting at conferences talking to presenters who were closer to my age. They acknowledged that in previous generations there was a focus on compliance that overcame. As well, parents were often more directly involved in the school. In a small town, teachers and parents met each other in the community. It often re-inforced the compliance. I am grateful for that to an extent, but it is only recently that I became aware that I needed to be aware of that and find a balance.
It’s great to embrace different ways of learning. I have achieved so much since I had chance to break away from traditional methods of learning and made progress I never thought possible!
Tradition hangs over us often going unnoticed, until we ask the right questions.