Kathleen Kesson

Community Schools Blueprint

This report was commissioned by the Bay and Paul Foundation to support the development of community schools in Vermont.

Three Scenarios for the Future of Education in the Anthropocene

This article in a Futures journal offers three scenarios for the future of education, each of them tied to various components of a dominant governing ideology.

https://jfsdigital.org/2020/04/12/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-education-in-the-anthropocene/)

Contemplative Inquiry, Indwelling, and the Art of Understanding the Child

This paper draws upon a number of distinct but overlapping areas in the literature on teaching: teacher inquiry, reflective practice, spirituality and education, and contemplative practice.

https://her.journals.publicknowledgeproject.org/index.php/her/article/view/2790/2640

Education for the End of the World (as we know it) (with Emily Hoyler)

https://www.johndeweysociety.org/the-journal-of-school-and-society/files/2023/02/Issue-8.2-4-Kesson_and_Hoyler.pdf

Writings about Neohumanism

Diversifying Universalism: Neohumanism, Internationalism, and Interculturalism in Education (with Marco Alexandre de Oliveira, available in Portuguese and English)

https://www.redalyc.org/journal/894/89474557046/

For Love of Frogs: Promoting Ecological Sensitivity Through the Arts

Inspired by the All Species Day spectacle in Vermont the author explores how the arts can be an effective bridge to unite us to the natural world in which we live.

For Love of Frogs

It Takes a Community

(commentary in the Vermont Digger)

Personalized learning is a way of tapping into the interests, desires and enthusiasms of the young people in our communities, and putting these to work.

https://vtdigger.org/2016/08/21/kathleen-kesson-takes-community/

Unschooling, Then and Now

(with Kellie Rolstad) in the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning

In this article, Rolstad and Kesson share their experiences of trusting children, of giving them the space and the resources to learn and grow in the ways that are best for them, comparing along the way what it was like to unschool then and what it is like to unschool now, in this era when our society has come to distrust children more than ever.

https://jual.nipissingu.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2014/06/v72142.pdf

Tarantulas in the Freezer (and other ethical dilemmas)

in the Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy

In the summer of 1983, the author purchased a twenty-acre plot of land in Paradise Township, an historic Oklahoma settlement nestled between the Tallgrass Prairie and the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Lacking adequate educational options for their four young boys, the family commenced on a five-year experiment in “unschooling.” This chapter from a forthcoming memoir chronicles her journey from Romantic notions of “being one with nature,” to co-existing with “the real deal, in all its teeming, hairy, ugly, creepy, crawly, slithering, slimy, swarming, buzzing, biting, sucking, stinging glory.” The article makes the argument that contemporary children need to be immersed in observations of and experiences with all sorts of creatures, even those that are “downright hostile to humans and ugly to boot,” if they are to develop a deep understanding of the natural world.

http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/1206

Individuation as Spiritual Process: Jung’s Archetypal Psychology and the Development of Teacher

This paper elaborates on James MacDonald’s theory of the ‘transcendental developmental ideology of education,’ and expands the boundaries of conventional thinking about the professional development of teachers by suggesting attention to what Carl Jung called the “individuation process” (spiritual and transpersonal development).

Individuation as Spiritual Process

Inhuman powers and ‘Terrible Things’: The theory and practice of alienated labor in urban schools

in The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies.

This paper looks at how teachers in low-performing New York City schools experience their professional work lives, using the concept of alienated labor as a lens through which to understand the problem.

http://www.jceps.com/archives/415

Thinking against from within: reconstituting the university as a democratic space

in The Vermont Connection

This article is a call to higher education leaders to promote democratic, transformative discourse within the University to truly examine the impact our actions or lack of actions have upon the world. It shows the interdependence the University and the world share, and that our actions within the University have complex and problematic implications in the world.

http://www.uvm.edu/~vtconn/?Page=v20/kesson.html&SM=search_menu.html

Neohumanism, Education, and Community Development

https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-58/58-nh-education-community-development/

A Neohumanist Theory of Learning

https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-57/57-neohumanist-theory-of-learning/

Rethinking STEAM for the Anthropocene

https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-56/56-rethinking-steam-for-the-anthropocene/

Synergy of Prout, Neohumanist Education, and the Spirit of Service

https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-54/

The Posthuman Era

https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-52/52-the-posthuman-era/

Decolonizing Education