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John Holt's impact

11/28/2012

My colleague from Holt Associates, Pat Farenga, has continued John Holt's work in all sorts of ways, and in January he will be bringing out a collection of essays in which people write about John's impact on their lives and work. I'm pleased that my piece, "What I'm Left With," will be included there.

Here's Pat's description of the book:

John was a different kind of teacher, to be sure, and this book shows how his personal and intellectual journey led him to support alternatives to school, not alternative schools, as a hopeful path for education. The book contains essays by people who knew John personally and were influenced by him, worked with him, or were taught by him. There are 16 essays by a variety of people, including Dr. Thomas Armstrong (author of Neurodiversity), Strobe Talbott (president of the Brookings Institute), Berrien Moore (director of the National Weather Service), and people long associated with homeschooling and GWS, including Larry and Susan Kaseman, Wendy Priesnitz, Susannah Sheffer, Aaron Falbel, Vita Wallace, Theo and Anita Geisy, and Peter Bergson. I plan to have this book published and ready for sale by mid-January 2013.

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First audiences

11/2/2012

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The first audiences to hear about the material in Fighting for Their Lives were those who attended the session on "How Should Communities Respond to Those Harmed by the Death Penalty?" at last year's International Institute for Restorative Practices conference, and, some months afterward, the law students who attended a training offered by Amicus - Assisting Lawyers for Justice on Death Row, Both groups were clearly interested in the excerpts that they heard and were eager for more.

I then had the opportunity to talk further about the material, and the issues it raises, with the others who chose to sit at the "trauma table" at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March. The symposium offers the useful feature of special-interest tables at meals, so that you can easily find others who want to talk about what you want to talk about. Yes, it could be said that it's a strange group that voluntarily sits at the trauma table, but I've found the conversations at that table to be reliably fascinating. It was exciting to talk with these folks, who felt like colleagues in the deep sense of the term, about what it had been like to interview capital defense attorneys about their emotional experience of the work. Others at the table who had engaged in related explorations -- like the one who facilitates a group for medical professionals to talk about the impact of their work -- were intrigued by the areas of overlap in what we were observing and thinking about.

I'm looking forward to more opportunities to talk about these experiences and ideas in the coming months.

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John Holt's impact

First audiences

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