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As published in the Maine Voices column in the Portland Press Herald, October 30, 2023. Let’s Build Hope for Youth through Policy Action While we are still reeling from the impact of the mass shooting in Lewiston on October 25th, let’s politicize this moment. You...

Congress is in chaos. It is barely news given how many times we have been told to brace for a government shut down. The House, speakerless for weeks now, has given the problem another dimension, and it is easier to see some of the social underpinnings of the crisis....

I’m impressed. Quinn Mitchell, 15, is engaged, determined, knowledgeable, civically responsible, and seemingly fair-minded. As Shannon Larson described, Mitchell is honestly interested in politics and has a strong knowledge of history, giving him perspective with...

What messages do we send when we bring the students with the highest GPAs up on the stage each year? We tell them that the most important thing is achieving more (academically) than their classmates. We tell them that even though "collaboration" is perhaps one of the...

I was twelve years old and had run from the school four times. The moons were whole. The assiduous government agents were waiting, waiting, waiting generation after generation without fail for the defeated tribes to stop running. The agents, hired hunters for the...

Education and the Nature of Childhood By Joan Jaeckel (Originally published on Medium)  This post features an essay, originally curated by me for a special issue on "socially responsible education" in Green Money Journal, by Arthur Zajonc, President...

Rosemary McMullen recently included the text below as a part of a longer piece, "Positionality, Fugivity, and Epistemic Humilty," on her blog, Liminal Weaver. This is an brief overview of our multi-month processing of the Healing Centered Education Summit...

Today is a day to remember that change doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen. Change doesn't happen linearly, in an orderly, progressive fashion, but it does happen. Change doesn't happen without sacrifice, but it does happen. It happens IF we persevere, IF we...

A theme that came out of our teacher's group today was overwhelm, the overwhelm that can come from constant empathetic listening when we aren't first grounded in ourselves, or have lost the grounding in the moment due to factors such as fear, or judgment, or just...

Whether it is a pre-k home school or high school chemistry class, the teacher sets the mood. The mood warms and invites or shuts doors and closes opportunity for connection. The power you have as an educator is enormous. And that's not just because you give grades...