Richmond IONS November 2020 Meeting (November. 21) and Central Virginia IONS Community Group Meeting. It will feature a talk by Charlie Kouns.
Where/When: Online only, through ZOOM, on Saturday, November 21, 2020, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon. See the detailed ZOOM instructions in the email.
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Richmond IONS November 2020 Meeting
“Imagining Learning − Youthful Visions for a New World.”
Our November 21, 2020 program will feature a talk by Charlie Kouns, co-founder of Butterfly Farm Sanctuary, near Ashville, NC.
Vladimir Megrè, in his 9-volume Ringing Cedars series, made famous the experimental school at the village of Tekos, in southwestern Russia near the Black Sea, founded by educational visionary Mikhail Petrovich Shchetinin in 1994.
The school embodies a revolutionary approach to education in a free-flowing, creative student-driven style which upends traditional pedagogical structures in which, by all accounts, has produced results beyond the wildest dreams of most educators.
Charlie Kouns, an American educational visionary in his own right, set out in 2007 on a personal quest to explore ways our approaches to education, especially at the secondary level (K-12), might be improved.
There are few invitations being extended to young people to participate in the examination, visioning and crafting of a new public educational offering in the United States. With high dropout rates, low engagement, walk-outs and protests, students are expressing a high degree of anger and frustration with education as it currently stands.
For eight years, Charlie Kouns travelled the United States, gathering teens together into Listening Sessions – where they expressed a profound wisdom as to how they would reinvent education if given the chance to do it on their own. These sessions ended with the presentation of their visions in 4×6 foot paintings.
The clarity, insightfulness and consistency of their visions was powerful and moving. Charlie will be presenting – for the first time – the collective voice of what was shared in these sessions. He will share the origin of this effort, the process, some of the paintings and the themes from their collective voice.
About Charles Kouns, Our Richmond IONS November 2020 Meeting Presenter:
Throughout most of his professional career, Charles Kouns has been in positions of listening and helping others hear what it is they have said to learn and transform. His skills as a facilitator and convener of open and authentic spaces into which others can safely speak their feelings, ideas and deep truths have long been recognized and appreciated.
As an educator for many years, primarily in the Richmond area, he taught young people from middle school all the way to graduate school. He also had a 15-year career in leadership in advertising and public relations both for corporations and advertising agencies, even running his own for more than seven years.
During this time, he helped establish working environments that were open and supportive, thus empowering the people he led to excel through
self-responsibility, cooperation and freedom to take initiative. In 2007, he founded and has led Imagining Learning, a national research initiative to discover how young people would transform education without the influence of adult voices.
Through creative, art-based Listening Sessions that he has led across the United States, Charlie has worked to create a national collective voice of young people’s wisdom about education, as they are underrepresented in the public discussion about change in education.
Currently, he walks arm in arm with his beloved partner Stella and his other beloved partner Mother Nature, at Butterfly Farm Sanctuary, a 22-acre spiritual retreat center they co-founded, nestled in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville.
About Central VA IONS Community Group:
Central VA IONS Community Group is an unincorporated association and a local community group of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, an international association based in Petaluma, California (www.noetic.org).
We are not associated with any religion, religious organization, doctrine or set of beliefs or practices and is open to all. Central VA IONS is entirely dependent upon voluntary donations of its members and friends to support its programs, mailings and other costs.
A love offering is requested at each meeting from those attending who are not dues paying members. Richmond IONS/Central VA IONS meetings are held each month at locations announced in its program notices and are open to all. Our website is at richmondions.com.
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