Satish Kumar

Pavel Cenkl

Education as if people and planet mattered In Transformative Learning , Satish Kumar reflects on the legacy of Schumacher College, a beacon of innovation that fosters an ecological-based, holistic model of higher education built around the college's unique "learn by doing," head, heart, and hands pedagogy. Over fifty current and former instructors and alumni, including Vandana Shiva, David Orr, Kate Raworth, Fritjof Capra, Bill McKibben, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Jonathon Porritt, paint a rich picture of education for human well-being and the ecological health of the planet. Contributions delve deeply into the nature of transformational learning and holistic education, present a wealth of alumni experiences of working towards an ecological society, and detail the expansion of the Schumacher model to Belgium, Brazil, India, Japan, and beyond. The result is a rich tapestry of ideas and educational methods packed with insights and experience for practitioners and activists looking to build a just, ecological society.

Reflections on 30 Years of Head, Heart, and Hands at Schumacher College

Transformative Learning

Nearly 30 million acres of the Northern Forest stretch across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Within this broad area live roughly a million residents whose lives are intimately associated with the forest ecosystem and whose individual stories are closely linked to the region’s cultural and environmental history. The fourteen engaging essays in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest effectively explore the relationships among place, work, and community in this complex landscape. Together they serve as a stimulating introduction to the interdisciplinary study of this unique region. Each of the four sections views through a different lens the interconnections between place and people. The essayists in “Encounters” have their hiking boots on as they focus on personal encounters with flora and fauna of the region. The energizing accounts in “Teaching and Learning” question our assumptions about education and scholarship by proposing invigorating collaborations between teachers and students in ways determined by the land itself, not by the abstractions of pedagogy. With the freshness of Thoreau’s irreverence, the authors in “Rethinking Place” look at key figures in the forest’s literary and cultural development to help us think about the affiliations between place and citizenship. In “Nature as Commodity,” three essayists consider the ways that writers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thought about nature as a product and, thus, how their conclusions bear on the contemporary retailing of place. The writers in Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest reveal the rich affinities between a specific place and the literature, thought, and other cultural expressions it has nurtured. Their insightful and stimulating connections exemplify adventurous bioregional thinking that encompasses both natural and cultural realities while staying rooted in the particular landscape of some of the Northeast’s wildest forests and oldest settlements.

Pavel Cenkl

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