Resources

Please find below an evolving assortment of some of my favorite professional resources. It's a skeleton at the moment, and I'll keep adding links to tools I have developed myself or resources I find myself most often consulting or recommending. Some emerge from recent academic research and some were written several decades or even centuries ago. Most were recommended to me by colleagues along the way, for whom I am most grateful! I worry about posting this now because it is incomplete, but if I wait till I have a complete list, it will never be posted at all!

I'm always eager to hear about new resources! Please do contact me with suggestions to enrich this list or to suggest areas I have forgotten to include. I also welcome requests for particular resources or kinds of resources that do not yet exist.

On why education must change--some of my influences: 

1. Ivan Illich's 1970 masterpiece Deschooling Society
2. Brene Brown's Rising Strong on resilience
3. Michael Sandel's 1998 lectures on What Money Can't Buy
4. Manfred Max-Neef's Human Scale Development
5. Other Worlds are Possible, the 6th report of the Working Group on Climate Change & Development
6. Terry Irwin's Transition Design proposal for Carnegie Mellon and beyond

For education-related startups

1. My Ecological Design Thinking MA dissertation for Schumacher College detailing the startup process and the theoretical framework underlying the Centre for Imagination.
2. A handbook we developed at Woodstock to guide self-directed student initiatives
3. Coming soon (when I find time!): A Startup Kit for a Centre for Imagination (do contact me if you're interested, so that I have an impetus for working on it!)

For drawing inspiration from nature and natural systems

1. Wendell Berry's poetry
2. Andreas Weber’s Enlivenment essay (this is so profound and provocative. I don't agree with everything, but it's interesting!) 
3. Edward O.Wilson’s Biophilia
4. A research article on the relationship between immersion in nature and the ability to think creatively.  
5. The Scandinavian concept of friluftsliv.
6. The Biomimicry Institute
7. Gregory Bateson's Steps To an Ecology of Mind 
8. Henri Bortoft's The Wholeness of Nature
9. PBS Documentary Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension. Perhaps an unlikely inclusion, but I find this concept foundational to all my thinking and planning now. The simple, iterative formulae at the root of each fractal form incredibly complex patterns that retain profound coherence. This concept can powerfully inform curriculum design, among other aspects of teaching and school life.
10. Goethe's Way of Seeing: an explanation There is much to explore here, and I welcome questions.
11. Bill Plotkin's Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World
12. On the role of plants in the classroom

For developing or enriching an approach to learning and teaching
I will not repeat here the standard catalogue of resources with which most trained teachers are eminently familiar. Instead, I'm including resources we may not often consider as having a lot ot say to educators.

1. Being in Nature: Experiential Learning and Teaching, a collection of papers from the 2007 conference.
2. Parker Palmer's To Know as We are Known
3. Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design (okay, one standard text--just can't resist! I love their work so much.)
4. George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" essay

For developing or enriching an approach to change
I find it immensely valuable to consider directions of change/compass-setting, as valuable as encountering specific theories of change

1. Harold Jarche on Trojan mice
2. Otto Scharmer's Leading from the Emerging Future
3. Iñigo Retolaza Eguren's Theory of Change
4. Wendell Berry essay in response to 9/11
5. Erich Fromm's To Have or to Be
6. The model of Transition Design developed at Carnegie Mellon
7. Patricia Shaw on the nature of change
8. Ruth Levitas' Utopia as Method
9. Wofgang Sachs' article defining/describing a move towards Cosmopolitan Localism

For rethinking professional learning communities

1. Peter Block's Community: The Structure of Belonging
2. Permaculture
3. Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilisation: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis and its accompanying RSAnimate

For leading

1. Michael Ressnick's "Thinking like a Tree"
2. A Rotman Management article on integrative thinking as a necessary quality for leadership (I've found this really helpful in thinking about organisations)
3. Iñigo Retolaza Eguren’s Theory of Change 
4. Wendell Berry on on problem-solving 
5. HBR's Discovering your authentic leadership
6. Jim Collins's Good to Great and Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
7. Simon Sinek's Golden Circle TED Talk

For systems thinking

1. Donella Meadow's Thinking in Systems
2. Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life
3. Its relationship to social innovation and current economic change
4. David Bohm’s masterpiece, Wholeness and the Implicate Order 
5. James Grier Miller’s Living Systems from 1978. This is incredibly dense and hard to wade through, but valuable.
6. Donella Meadows’ article on Leverage Points: places to intervene in a system 
7. Iain McGilchrist’s "Recapturing the Whole" 
8. This article includes a fantastic reading list!       
9. An early 90s paper redefining design as a liberal art committed to solving systemic, "wicked" problems that are messy and complex.
10. Manuel Lima
• Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information
• The Book of Circles
• The Book of Trees
• TED Talk on The Visual History of Networks

For design thinking & codesign methods

1. IDEO's Field Guide for Human-Centered Design (Invaluable, and downloadable as a PDF)
2. Stanford Design Lab
3. Helsinki Design Lab's Recipes for Systematic Change
4. Using fictional bio-prototypes as a way to tackle systems thinking 
5. A recent paper on natural prototyping, living systems, and the implications for design education 
6. A paper on how to prototype in organizations 
7. On biomimicry for product design:
1. Introduction to a Biomimicry Design Lens
2. Deeper philosophical exploration

On the conflicted role of technology in our lives

1. Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and design face the future
2. Adam Alter's Irresistible
3. Neil Postman "Five things we need to know about technological change" essay