Cara DeBusk

Cara DeBusk is the co-founder of Houston Sudbury School, which opened January 2016. She is a full-time staff member who serves HSS as the Office Clerk, Co-clerk for Official Authorities, Admissions Clerk, The PR Clerk, the Parent Liaison, Visitor Clerk, Art Corp Secretary, and Dance Corp Secretary, all elected positions. Cara is a former teacher of almost 20 years and unschooled her younger daughter for six years before helping to open Houston Sudbury School. She has 2 daughters, one in college and one attending Houston Sudbury School.

Cassidy Younghans

Cassidy has always wanted to be a teacher. She taught in public education for 5 years before shifting her path towards Self-Directed Education. Currently, Cassidy co-organizes the annual Self-Directed Path Conference and Workshop each year hosted in Dallas, Texas and works at various democratic and free schools. Cassidy believes in empowering students through Self-Directed Education and loves mentoring kids as they learn and grow.

Chantal Saucier

Chantal Saucier is a libertarian writer, entrepreneur, and founding member of the (not yet open) Lafayette Sudbury School. She is passionate about freedom and freedom in education. She lives in South Louisiana with her husband and daughter, and recently launched a new blog at TheNoSchoolZone.com.

Charlotte (Candy) Landvoigt, Ed.D.

Charlotte (Candy) Landvoigt, Ed.D. co-founded The Highland School, a democratic day and boarding school in 1981. She has been a staff member there for 36 years..

Chetan Erande

Chetan Erande is an active parent in the Self-Directed Education movement in Pune City, India. He has been trying to bring parents there together to create the necessary environment for Self-Directed Education. When he and his partner started homeschooling, initially they were following text books and a curriculum, but now they are 100% convinced and following Self-Directed education. They have been homeschooling their son for the last four years.

Claire Russell

My career in Clinical Social Work began at Community Healthlink in Central Massachusetts, where I provided child and family therapy, and developed a school-based services program that provided on-site clinical services for children and adolescents, as well as consultation to, and coordination with parents and teachers in more than a dozen school districts. Having treated countless children and families, I am aware of the significance of the child's school experience in the development of self-esteem, self-reliance and responsibility. Increasingly, children are being diagnosed and medicated, often because their individual attributes do not reconcile with the rigid and standardized requirements of the school environment in which they find themselves. During my career, I directed children's programs in both community mental health, and developmental disabilities. Currently, I am using this experience, as well as my experience in parenting a child mwhose journey illustrates the benefits of self-directed education, to write and consult about the inseparable connection between conventional educational practices, and the troubling direction of children's mental health.

Crystal Byrd Farmer

Crystal Byrd Farmer is an engineer turned educator from Gastonia, North Carolina. She is a co-founder and facilitator at Gastonia Freedom School, an Agile Learning Center focused on children with disabilities. Her in free time, she speaks and writes about diversity in intentional communities. Her blog, Highland Rising, is about the history of her historically black neighborhood. She is also the website editor for Black & Poly, which helps promote healthy polyamorous relationships for people of color. Crystal is passionate about encouraging people to change their perspectives on diversity, relationships, and the world.

Daveed Jacobo
(he/they)

CDavid (pronounced Daveed) was born in Los Angeles and raised between Oregon and California. A second generation immigrant of Mexican and Guatemalan descent, David and their family moved constantly to find work opportunities until finally landing in Salem. They graduated with a B.S. in Sociology at Portland State University. After working for three years in public schools, David sought to find alternative education styles that focused less on conforming and authority and more on creativity and autonomy and they now work at Village Free School in Portland OR as a professional facilitator/advisor. David is an unschooling and youth advocate, a musician, and a photographer. Check out their work at davidjacobo.com .

David Lane

David Lane began his search for self-directed education his first year as a teacher, 1991. His journey took him to a variety of schools on both coasts, and currently, central Massachusetts. In 2011, David led a team to submit a charter school application, which the state rejected, a result he describes as "the best thing that could have happened." While developing the application, he discovered the SDE community, most notably Ken Danford, co-founder of North Star, Self-Directed Learning for Teens, and Liberated Learners, Inc. David knew he had found what he had been looking for, and determined to create a Liberated Learner center in central Massachusetts. Ingenuity Hub, Personalized Learning Collaborative opened in October 2016. While he and his team continue to grow that organization, David works full time at a traditional high school in central Massachusetts, where he also strives to help students take control of their own education, or deschool in school.

David O'Connor

David O'Connor, along with over 15 other families, founded the Philly Agile Learning Community in Philadelphia, where he is now one of the Agile Learning Facilitators. David has 2 children, who are both self-directed learners. David is also a theater director, designer and teacher, and currently is a guest lecturer at University of Pennsylvania. Feel free to reach out to David at david@phillyalc.org.

Deborah Sale-Butler

Deborah Sale-Butler works as a voice actor and mom to an autistic autodidact in Los Angeles. She has been blogging about her journey in Self-Directed Education with the hope of encouraging other parents with special needs children to create their own futures.

Dolores Bulit

Dolores Bulit unschooled her son from 6 to 12 in Argentina. With a group of families, she opened a free school in 2012 regularly serving ages 6 to 12. Tierra Fértil started March 2013 in her backyard, with 9 kids, one teacher and a mother taking turns as a second adult guide. Until today, TF operates as a not- for-profit and cooperative decision making family and educators organization. It aims to be a place of play, consensus, self-development and creation, different from school as a sole knowledge reproduction system. Still not approved by the local education laws, among other similar projects they still struggle with economic sustainability and legal recognition. Tierra Fértil has inspired other initiatives in Argentina and Latin America and is part of a broader network of child centered schools and movements that meet annually and help each other.

Elena Goodson

Elena Goodson is an international student of the world. She speaks five languages and is currently studying Arabic in Cairo, Egypt. Elena Goodson is passionate about learning through experience. As such, she has attended many conferences around the world ranging from cyber security to Arab media.

Elena is a student at Praxis, which is a professional development program. Through Praxis, she studies marketing and writing. She also runs her own website, GoodsonEditorial.org.

In her free time, Elena likes to write poetry and short stories.

Elizabeth Lund
(she/her)

Elizabeth Lund is a radical educator and freelance writer in the Chicago area. She has 10 years of experience at Tallgrass Sudbury School in Riverside, IL, and is a former staff member at Not Back to School Camp. She is passionate about human rights for young people, including the right to physical self-determination (such as using the bathroom and choosing when to eat), voting rights, and educational freedom. She enjoys working with young people as full humans and hopes that someday self-directed education will be accessible to all in a publicly funded way.

Emerson Leach
(they/them)

Emerson is a 13 yr old student at ALC Mosaic. For the past year, Emerson has been discovering what it means to be a self-directed student. Through all the bumps in the road, art has emerged as a main focus of Emerson's self-directed path and they can most often be found with a paintbrush or a colored pencil in hand.

Emerson hopes to share several more pieces about their self-directed journey for Tipping Points and inspire other teens to share their experiences as well.

Esther Jones

Esther is a mindfulness teacher, writer and podcaster. She was led into unschooling by her children, who have helped her unravel years of conditioned beliefs around parenting, children, learning and neurodiversity. After two decades in Spain, Esther and her family now live in England, where Esther works with parents on their deschooling journeys. In her podcast, The Unschool Space, she interviews other parents about the joys and challenges of embracing consensual living with our children. You can find her podcast and blog on unschooling, neurodiversity and deschooling at www.esther-jones.com

Francesca Liberatore

Francesca Liberatore is an unschooling mother who spends much of her time talking, thinking and writing about respectful parenting, children's rights and self-directed education. She was born and raised in Rome, Italy, left home to study history at university in the UK, and has since lived all over the world. She has worked as a journalist, an archive researcher for the BBC, a yoga teacher and a Montessori guide, and has written about parenting, education and life for blogs, magazines and websites.

She currently unschools her two children, edits for Tipping Points Magazine and is involved in all sorts of projects from learning to paint to facilitating virtual unschooling groups, to doing the inner work that deschooling requires. She believes that children's rights are political and inextricably linked to the rights of all oppressed people, anti-capitalism and climate justice. She writes a lot about this and her ongoing quest to live out her beliefs @bigmothering on Instagram.

Gary Bloom

Gary Bloom worked in the mental health system for several decades, in numerous settings, with every client population, and every age group, while employing various counseling approaches. He dabbled in supervision, and taught several grad-school courses where he rates himself as under appreciated.

Gary lives just north of Seattle, where he fails to take part in hiking, biking, skiing, boating, and other staples of the Pacific Northwest. He does, however, manage the business end of his wife's care consultation practice, train in Tai Chi, roast coffee for himself and his family, root for the Seahawks, fondle his beloved Apple devices, continue to give his adult children unsolicited advice, and refer to himself in the third person.

Grace Llewellyn

Grace Llewellyn taught school for three years before leaving and writing The Teenage Liberation Handbook, which was first published in 1991. In 1996 she founded Not Back to School Camp, a gathering for unschooled teenagers, which continues to bring joy, inspiration, community, and interesting challenges to her life. Along the way there've been three other books, two self-directed education centers -- and plentiful failures, surprises, mistakes, mysteries, adventures, and life lessons. Grace loves every kind of dance, especially Argentine tango. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her favorite son and their timid cat.

Haley Tilt

Haley Tilt grew up in Portland, Oregon where her education included caring for animals on her family's small farm, serving her community through Girl Scouts, and developing a passion for academics in public school. She majored in Classics at Reed College, then moved to Baltimore where she taught high school history in a public charter school. Her exposure to systemic oppression within high-poverty urban schools compelled her to think about the political implications of education and education reform. She's currently on her own self-directed journey to learn more about alternative approaches to education that empower kids, which she documents on her blog.

Heesun Hall

Heesun Hall is a homeschooling mom whose daily life looks nothing like she ever imagined for herself. When she began this journey, her intention was to recreate school at home -- she'd be the teacher, with two students, sitting at tables and "doing school" for a few hours each day. Within the first month of that journey, she quickly realized that such was not to be. Her kids didn't want to sit for "lessons". Nor were they too interested in whatever plans she had for them.

Having studied child development in college, she knew that each of her kids would follow their own path. What she hadn't realized is just how different those paths would be.

Hope Wilder

Hope Wilder is a lifelong learner and community builder living in Durham, North Carolina. She is the founder of Pathfinder Community School, a self-directed learning community for ages 5-14. She is an advocate for self-directed and democratic education and enjoys contributing to communities that support these practices. For the previous dozen years, she worked and played as an alternative outdoor educator and science teacher at private schools and local nonprofits in the Raleigh/Durham area including Piedmont Wildlife Center and Duke Gardens. She enjoys making art & music, DIY fashion, and being outside.

Ian Campbell (he/him)

Ian Campbell is a community-oriented educator committed to the fostering of lifelong learners. He places a high value on empathy, cooperation, and social consciousness and seeks to embody those traits as a teacher. His life's passion has been to study examples of societies the world over that have modeled egalitarianism, autonomy, and a deep connection to their local landscape, both in the past and present.

He is an advocate for democratic education as a part of that broader human paradigm and speaks on the need for such free spaces to build bridges with one another. Ian enjoys teaching history from the point of view of everyday people, anthropology, and the lessons to be learned from Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, and nothing brightens his day like seeing people reconnect with the land beneath their feet through his foraging lessons. In his free time, Ian tries to spend every minute he can outdoors hiking, foraging, or camping with friends.

ieishah Clelland-Lange (she/her)

ieishah Clelland-Lange is a writer, mother, and serial expat originally from New York City. She has lived in 6 different countries after completing her tenure as a British Marshall Scholar at the University of Sussex at Brighton and the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in TRACE Magazine, Prophecy, Ebony, Clutch, Mater Mea, Mutha Magazine, Mommy-Ish, Global Grind, about.com, and she has been a featured speaker on the BBC.

Iris Chen (she/her/hers)

Iris Chen (she/her/hers) is the founder of the Untigering movement and author of Untigering: Peaceful Parenting for the Deconstructing Tiger Parent. As a peaceful parenting advocate, intersectional unschooler, anti-oppression activist, and deconstructing tiger mom, her mission is to inspire generational and cultural transformation, especially among Asian communities. She spent 16 years living overseas in China (land of the tiger parent!) but now resides in her native California with her husband, two sons, and cat. You can read more about her adventures in parenting and unschooling at untigering.com.

James Davis

James Davis is an unschooling father of 3, as well as a co-founder of the Stomping Ground, a summer camp dedicated to helping kids to thrive in an environment of freedom and trust.

He has spent the last 3 years speaking at conferences throughout the United States and Canada trying to help summer camp directors understand that kids discover and nurture their best selves when they are given space to be exactly who they are.

He and his wife, Taylor, each work half time so they can dedicate half of their working time to create a nutrient rich environment for their self-directed children.

You can reach him by emailing him at james@gocamp.pro. He would love to hear from you about child development, parenting, or the beautiful things they've seen when kids are given space to direct their own learning.

Jan Hunt

Jan Hunt, B.A. Psychology, M.Sc. Counseling Psychology, is a parenting and unschooling counselor, and the author of The Natural Child: Parenting From the Heart (2001) and the bilingual children's book A Gift for Baby (2009). Jan and her always-unschooled son, Jason co-edited The Unschooling Unmanual (2016).

She has published articles in numerous journals and parenting publications, and on her Natural Child Project website, now celebrating 20 years online. She is the former Editorial Assistant of the quarterly journal Empathic Parenting, published by the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Her parenting column "The Natural Child" appeared in Natural Life from 1989 to 1998. See Jan's parenting advice and more articles by leading mental health professionals at naturalchild.org.

Jan envisions "a world in which all children are treated with dignity, respect, understanding, and compassion." She lives in British Columbia, Canada, and is available for counseling worldwide.

Jane Arisi

Jane is a writer, artist, and high school student. She spends her days ranting on Twitter (@janearisi), writing books, and learning new skills. She is passionate about education. Her novel "Blue-Haired Killer Queen" can be found here.

Janet LoSole

Janet LoSole is a freelance writer living in Ontario, Canada. She holds a Bachelor of Education degree (French) and is a certified TESOL instructor. Before her career as a parent-educator, Janet taught French at the elementary level and has taught ESL internationally since 1994.

World travel is the primary curriculum resource for her two unschooled daughters. A staunch advocate of community-based tourism, Janet has made numerous presentations on the concept to community groups, encouraging people to eschew corporate package tours in favour of supporting local family-owned businesses. She writes about homeschooling and traveling. Her work has been published in Learning Tangent Magazine, Natural Child Magazine, Hackwriters.com, Ontario Home Educator Magazine, Homeschooler Magazine, Canada's Education Magazine, and Vagabondfamily.org.

Janice McDonald

Janice is a mother to two young people who practice SDE. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Tipping Points magazine and press. She helped Alder Commons (an SDE space in Portland, OR) get off the ground. She's honored to be able to help ASDE and the SDE movement by focusing her energy on Tipping Points because hearing other people's experiences has been crucial to her own SDE journey.

Javier Bronchalo

Javier is passionate about learning. He is enthusiastic about the idea of the learner as a social constructor of learning, who best learns through the active acquisition of information, peer support, inner motivation, self-direction, and participating in a community based on equality and mutual respect. Co-founder of Knowlege Constructors. Project coordinator at SOLE Spain. Working in research and development of e-learning projects at Knowledge Constructors and SOLE Spain. He has worked in different schools as an elementary teacher and ICT coordinator.

Je'anna L Clements

Growing up, Je'anna Clements was blessed with plenty of free time, access to natural environments and a variety of interesting people, and managed to effectively self-educate in spite of her schooling.

Working with children's participation and environmental rights, she realised how many kids experienced school as 'day-jail'. Putting this together with what she had learned during her Psychology honours degree, she became convinced that there must be more humane ways to educate kids, and started reading work by authors like Carl Rogers and Ivan Illich. Becoming a mom to a very strong willed child with zero interest in anyone else's curricula, quickly completed her induction into consciousness of self-led learning processes.

She is committed to making genuinely self directed learning options more available in South African and hopes that the Johannesburg Sudbury once opened, can become a training and networking hub to inspire and support initiatives throughout the African continent.

Jeana Jones

Jeana Jones is a first generation homeschooler that is passionate about raising this generation, including her three children, with an understanding that they are fully capable and free to navigate their rightful place in this world. She has devoted her life to working in fields requiring understanding of human nature and development. From working as an Emergency Medical Tech, to developing and coaching a youth Brazilian Jiu Jitsu program, to running an Agile Learning Center.

Her constant questioning of "how can we do better" has led to years of self study in communication, mental health, and child development and her work is deeply rooted in bringing awareness to youth rights and autonomy. Her recent move to the Northeast Georgia mountains with her partner of 17 years has her getting back to her roots of roaming outdoor spaces and working playfulness into every day.

Jenni Mahnaz

Jenni is a photographer, homeschool consultant, unschool advocate, Mother, and long time SDE supporter. She discovered SDE in 2011 and never looked back.

Jenni has have unschooled several teens in NYS (both upstate and in NYC) and worked closely with Manhattan Free School (now ALC NYC) and ALC Mosaic in Charlotte, NC. Over the course of 20 years, she have worked with children in many different learning environments. After a brief stint as a special education teacher in the NYC public school system, she finally discovered the freedom of SDE.

In addition to working with self-directed families to find their educational footing, Jenni am also a photographer who captures the freedom of SDE & childhood through her camera lens. Jenni's work regularly takes her between NY and NC, where she lives with her husband and their two young children.

Jennifer Campbell (they/she)

Jennifer Campbell is a fierce advocate for autonomy, community, and reparative accountability. Jennifer is a Facilitator and adult learner at Abrome where they work to liberate their social work training from oppressive paradigms. Their deschooling process has included playing Garden Superheroes while weeding the community garden, devouring novels, and reacquainting themselves with the piano. They daily feel grateful for the opportunity to critically analyze complex social issues alongside young people. Jennifer's commitment to police and prison abolition has led them to organize around migration, mental health, and homelessness. Their spiritual practices include drawing, painting, dancing, and performing.

Jessica Carrasco

Jessica was born in Santiago, Chile (1972). She and her husband moved to Canada in 2005.

Jessica is a plastic artist and a writer. She has published two bilingual books for children (The Child That I Am and Colourful Children), has a column in the Latin Magazine Presencia Latina called Upbringing and Learning (Crianza y Aprendizaje) in Halton Region and works as facilitator for the program Learning In The Woods in the city of Dundas.

She also has studied Visual and Creative Art, Social Development and Educational Management. Mindsight, nutrition and brain development has been her main focus along her path, but most of all, taking her daughter everywhere to explore the world and learn from real life experiences.

Joei Villarama

Joei has tried homeschooling, unschooling and worldschooling her two boys, and is continuously curious and learning about SDE.

Jonathan Turcotte-Summers

Jonathan is a volunteer facilitator at Mont-Libre agile learning centre in Montréal, Canada. He has been teaching and studying education for 15 years, with experience at every level of the school system—from preschool to university—in Canada, Finland, South Korea, and Thailand. He finished his master's degree at Concordia University with a thesis examining the discourse surrounding the 2012 Québec student strike, and has also written about the transformative potential of anti-oppressive practice and the fossil fuel divestment campaign.

He got into teaching because, as a shy, awkward teenager himself, he found that working with kids brought out the best in him. But, like many, he has since become somewhat disillusioned with the school system and the social, political, and economic structures within which it operates. He now finds himself looking for ways to contribute to either radically transforming those structures or, where that isn't possible, developing sustainable alternatives.

José Sánchez Galán

José's specialities are project-based learning, blended learning, gamification, flipped learning, self-regulated learning, self-directed learning, e-learning

He is passionate about his profession, teaching. He's worked as a teacher in all educational stages: children, primary, secondary and university. Currently, he works as a teacher at the college training future teachers of Physical Education. His main challenge is for teachers of the future to acquire the necessary skills to bring about the much needed pedagogical renewal of the 21st-century school.

But above all this, his top priorities are his one-year-old daughter and the practice of physical activities in nature (climbing, climbing, mountain biking, orienteering).

Josh Pickel

After 5 years working in public education and determining that the traditional school harms many of the young people it purports to serve, Josh resigned his public school teaching position to work with Liberated Learners to open a Self-Directed Learning Center for teenagers in his hometown of Canton, Illinois. He founded Canton Learning Collaborative in July of 2022. Now in its second year, CLC has helped over a dozen families end their reliance on traditional schooling in favor of a more self-directed path.

Josh is also a GED Instructor and tutor with over a decade of experience working with young people. His degree is in Elementary and Middle School Education with graduate specialization in Instructional Media Design. Aside from his interest in alternative education and education reform, his other interests include localism, community organization, political theory, and Chicago sports. He enjoys spending time with his wife and two children, cooking, reading, and writing.

Judy Arnall

Judy Arnall, BA, CCFE, DTM is a Certified Canadian Family Life Educator, Distinguished Toastmaster keynote speaker, and mom of 5 unschooled children, 4 of whom have graduated university or is currently studying. She specializes in child development and is a master of non-punitive parenting and education practices. Judy is the bestselling author of 5 print books including Discipline Without Distress. Her latest book is Unschooling To University: Relationships Matter Most in a World Crammed With Content.
jarnall@shaw.ca | www.professionalparenting.ca | www.unschoolingcanada.ca

Julia Brodsky

Julia Brodsky is a homeschooling mom of three, with an undergraduate background in science education, and M.Sc in astrophysics. Over the years, Julia taught International Space Station astronauts and flight controllers, worked as a rocket scientist at NASA, helped out at NASA outreach centers, and worked as a math and science teacher at private schools and colleges. She also founded a math circle for K-5 kids, wrote a book on informal math education and presented at Matematical Sciences Research Institute at UC Berkeley and international astrobiology conferences.

Now, Julia is focused on teaching the big perspective, questioning and systems thinking skills via astrobiology and space exploration. Her educational startup, Art of Inquiry, serves hundreds of curious students all over the globe.

Juliana Machado

Hi, you all! My name is Juliana Machado and I am passionate about creating things out of improbable connexions. That's why, despite having a bachelor's degree in Architecture in chose to dive into the educational world (another very interesting building process). I've been working as a teacher for 17 years now, but I always felt there was something wrong with schools, especially when I saw kids acting like they could care less. The worst part was seeing adults talking about those kids, like they needed some fixing. Well, that (and some other deep issues) brought up my interest to know more about the human psyche, so I studied and became a psychoanalyst. It wasn't enough to understand the "whys" and its origins... I had to find out "hows", the ways for people to express themselves and invest their time more wisely. So, I studied new economies, like creative, collaborative, shared and multi currencies. That was when I learned about things like NVC (non violent communication), Sociocracy, Reinventing Organizations and Holochain, which brought me to ALC (Agile Learning Center). After that, me and a couple of friends found ALC São Paulo in May 2018. Now, I am still working in a conventional school and trying hard to hack the system, at least in my classes. I am thrilled to learn about self directed learning, responsible choices and creating a life that truly represents me. I can tell you that I am on my way, knowing that there's a long adventure ahead. Two things I have learned so far: 1. You can use your skills to build a fancy home and protect yourself from the world, or you can build a stairway and look at the world from a higher perspective, and let yourself be amazed by it. 2. Power is not about the capacity of doing something, but about the wisdom to wisely choose what to do, regarding yourself, others and the planet.

Julie Polanco

Julie Polanco is active in the women's ministry and on the worship team at her local church in the Chicago area. She and her husband have homeschooled their four children from the beginning, graduating their oldest in 2016. Julie regularly writes for Old Schoolhouse Magazine, Homeschooling with Heart blog, and others. She remains active in her local homeschooling meetup group, planning activities for tweens and teens. Follow her at her blog, www.juliepolancobooks.com.

Katherine Williams

Unschooling Outside of Institutionalization, is the story of my family and our years unschooling together.

To reconcile the profound dissonance between what I thought education had to be and what the children were showing me they needed, I wrote. And this book proceeds from that journal. I share how we moved forward with the hope that this will spread some light and comfort to other homeschooling families and to anyone who seeks to better understand what educational freedom looks like in the field, outside the confines of a traditional classroom. Hopefully unschooling will be the subject of increasing scientific inquiry. But my book is a narrative about the years our kids were growing and we endeavored, with the good intentions and ferocity of any dedicated parents, to find a kinder and richer way to educate them. We did not know, in setting out, that we would also stumble across a way to set the children and ourselves free.

Katie Lane-Karnas

Katie Lane-Karnas is unschooling in central Vermont with her husband and two surviving daughters. She grew up in a professional education family, got a bachelor's degree in Music Education, and pursued master's work in Literacy. She's been studying learning, schools, and freedom her whole life. She taught and learned in public schools and prisons in NJ, NY and VT and observed hundreds of hours of preschools in a research position. After the home births of her daughters and the death of her second child, Katie began walking the path of her most authentic living. Life without school emerged as the most life-affirming (and least expected) path forward for her family. She creates supports for homeschool and unschool mothers engaged in personal transformation, and helps homeschooling families in Vermont meet state requirements with ease.

Dr. Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson

Dr. Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson is an assistant professor of education at the University of North Georgia and is interested in non-dominant conceptualizations of education. Her five children, aged two to 17, are unschoolers and awesome humans.

Kelly Seacrest

Kelly Seacrest is a artist and teacher. Born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, Kelly moved away to Minnesota for college to study art. She returned to Lincoln to earn her art teaching certificate. After teaching for six years in a public middle school and doing a year of reading about alternative education, Kelly decided to take a year off to visit them in person.

Traveling around the US and England, Kelly has gotten first hand experience this year through visiting schools, programs and meeting amazing students, teachers, families, educators, activists and community organizers. Traveling with Kelly is her husband Peter Stegen. Together they are currently working on a documentary about alternative education to share with their community back in Lincoln NE.

Kenneth Danford

Kenneth Danford is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens. Through North Star, Kenneth has supported more than 600 teens to leave school and embark on a self-directed approach. North Star is now the lead organization of the Liberated Learners network of a dozen centers throughout the United States and Canada.

Prior to establishing North Star, Kenneth attended public schools in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and then Amherst College and Brown University. He taught in both the Prince George's County, MD and Amherst, MA public schools. Kenneth has spoken about his experience of making school optional as an annual presenter at the AERO Conference and other panels. He participated in the TEDx Conference in Amherst College in 2013 and at the Thrive 2020 Conference in Guernsey, United Kingdom in 2015. After twenty years in the field, Kenneth is as enthusiastic as ever about helping teens and families change their lives in this profound way.

Klavdija Hočevar Kastelic

Klavdija Hočevar Kastelic - My life is coloured by a variety of events, each adding its own unique hue. I enjoy reading current news in the fields of accounting, finance, and politics. Due to my active lifestyle, I am also involved in gardening, education related to alternative schooling and self-directed learning, health, and other significant topics. I fill my days with playing the guitar, mentoring young firefighters, and leading members in various activities. I have several years of experience volunteering for children through various organizations. I used to be musically active and organized workshops for children too. Now that I have a little more time in the evenings, I am learning to play the ukulele, and sometimes I also try the concertina.

I convey the impression of an enthusiastic and ambitious young individual who is eager to contribute to teamwork with care, great attention to detail, and excellent organizational skills. I am a passionate advocate of a positive approach to solving challenges and am empathetic towards my fellow human beings. This mindset has been extremely beneficial in the fire service, where I have gained experience in cooperation and mutual aid since childhood. I am not afraid of disagreements and can always present arguments for my viewpoint while being understanding of different perspectives.

Kris Kolff

Kris has lived a full and varied life. He was attached to universities for about 10 years, and dropped out in the early 1970's.

He has lived in and around many communes and communities, including those linked to Osho Rajneesh for several years. He has two adult children of his own.

In 2005 he moved to Wantoo Wantoo, the small community of friends, including children, where he still lives. This is in the Nelson area, New Zealand.

Kris is passionate about how we raise our kids. His living at Wantoo Wantoo has helped heal wounds he felt from parenting his own kids. Inspiration from books like The Continuum Concept and Non-Violent Communication have been an integral part of this process.

Laura Rhodes

Laura excelled in school and was a voracious reader, until required reading turned her favorite pastime into a tedious chore. School began to feel like a prison and learning was no longer fun.

Her first two children attended and graduated from public school, but by the time her three younger children were in school, the system had just become too much. As she watched one of her young boys struggle with the demands of school and saw him becoming increasingly anxious and withdrawn, she knew she had to find a better way.

In her research of homeschooling methods she came across the concept of unschooling. She has since learned to embrace self directed education as she realized it's how she's learned best herself all along. Her 3 younger children are currently enrolled at Houston Sudbury School.

Laura Grace Weldon

Laura Grace Weldon is the author of Free Range Learning, a heavily researched and resource-packed handbook of natural education. She lives on Bit of Earth Farm where she'd get more done if she didn't spend so much time reading library books, cooking weird things, and singing to livestock.

Her background includes raising four self-directed learners, leading nonviolence workshops, writing poetry with nursing home residents, facilitating support groups for abuse survivors, and teaching classes in memoir and poetry. Connect with her at lauragraceweldon.com, the Free Range Learning community on FB, and her perch @earnestdrollery.

Logan Westberg

Logan is currently a part-time Cook for Barro's Pizza, and a participant in the Discover Praxis program. With Praxis he leverages his creativity, drive, and cooperative abilities to learn about the world of business so that he can work towards a lifetime of helping people. He look forward to the exposure of new environments in the coming years so that he can learn what it takes to make it in the world of business.

Lora Smothers

Lora Smothers is easily delighted by other people, especially her husband and two kids. She loves hosting crowds in her Athens, Georgia home for dinner and music-making and has a heart for adopting people who need a family. She enjoys learning and teaching and believes that children are some of the best leaders. She dabbles in school leading, church planting, society reimagining, activism, songwriting, Zumba instructing, and telling knock-knock jokes with her daughter. Knowing that God enjoys her is what keeps her going.

Maddie/Madelyn Zins (she/her)

Maddie/Madelyn Zins (she/her) is a nurturer of nature in all beings big and small. She is interested in how humans learn, language (specifically poetry), nature and how we can re-build human relationship with it, and co-creation of societal paradigms that recharge human culture with equity for all folks.

Maddie is a director and facilitator at Cottonwood NYC, a small cooperative, self-directed learning center. Sometimes Maddie helps organize ASDE gatherings in NYC. Maddie also leads a group of NYC-based artists to nature for connection-centric creativity camps with a zany group of nature lovers called Fresh Air Collective. She is based in Brooklyn but open to suggestions of places that are quieter and still close to epicenters of culture and human interaction.

Madison Kanna

Madison was homeschooled as a child, an experience that instilled in her an appreciation of learning as a lifelong and self-directed process. Her unconventional education included private tutoring, interning for the number #1 homeschool website www.homeschool.com (according to Forbes Magazine in 2000), and traveling to Hawaii and the Channel Islands on expeditions with Robert Ballard, the scientist who found the Titanic. Madison loves to read, write, code and collaborate with others to create meaningful things. She's currently a junior developer and working on expanding her knowledge of software development.

Matthew Gioia

Matthew Gioia is a staff member at Hudson Valley Sudbury School in Kingston, NY. Matthew began seeking alternative educational environments halfway through college. He participated in Naropa University's "contemplative education program" in Boulder, CO, and studied at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, which offers a Great Books curriculum. From there, he moved to Mississippi to teach in a rural middle school and attend the Ole Miss on weekends. Matthew came to HVSS by way of a search for a place where he is permitted to respect children and teenagers as fully human beings.

Margaret Bennett

Margaret Bennett is a single parent raising her son as a whole life unschooler in a partnership paradigm. They are both Autistic/ADHD and reside in the Gallatin Valley, Bozeman MT US.

The unschooling dyad's unconventional experience is rooted in paradigms of attachment parenting that gave way to the whole life freedoms inherent in self directed learning. Margaret facilitates her son's self-agency while he learns over time to facilitate himself. The magic of attunement promotes individuality and interdependence within a structure of connection.

Margaret shares authentic ideas and experiences at maggieorganizingchaos.com. Her career followed numerous entrepreneurial paths along with conventional work in higher education and state government. She also exhibited her art work professionally. 'Process' has always been at the core of her intentions as an artist. Examples of her art work are curated at MargaretLoveBennett.com.

Marley Richards

Marley Richards, 14, is an unschooler of 7+ years, and avid dancer. She finds a way to include social justice work in all her interests, mostly character design and K-Pop.

Marni Kammersell

Marni Kammersell is a doctoral student at the Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education. However, her greatest teachers are her three twice-exceptional children. Together, they've been living a self-directed learning lifestyle since 2009. As a homeschooling and neurodiversity parent coach, Marni loves sharing the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and self-directed education. She enjoys helping families transition from traditional educational models into homeschooling in a way that works for their unique learners. You can find her at nurturingneurodiversity.com

Mary Chang

Mary is an independent educational researcher and parent to two young children. She and her husband continue to learn about unschooling from reading and speaking with others. They are excited to explore this approach with their children. Part of the challenge, they realize, is to deschool themselves. It's an ongoing and exciting relational journey.

Mercer Carlin

Mercer is a founding parent from the original ALC in NYC. Mercer's passion for and commitment to self-directed learning were much of the inspiration for Arthur Brock (Mercer's son's father) to turn what was formerly the Manhattan Free School into the first Agile Learning Center.

She has spent the last 21 years in Corporate America as an Executive at a company named TRANZACT. Her passion has been to create human-focused, empowering cultures in the workplace. Most recently she has been responsible for close to 1,000 licensed insurance agents across four locations. These centers are known for being great work environments as a result of the work of Mercer and her team.

Mercer recently departed from her job and is serving as a Coordinator of the Agile Learning Center Network.

Megan Baker

Megan Baker runs a summer camp and an after-school care program in Austin, TX, and has a 16-year-old son who self-directs his education.

Megan is an advocate of the free-range movement and feels kids should be climbing trees and exploring independently again. She also writes about child abuse and racism in how we think and talk about that abuse.

She is also an aspiring screenwriter and is currently working on a comedy. She enjoys traveling, watching her son run, cycle, and play soccer, reading, and playing with her two-year-old Great Pyrenees/Lab mix, Greta.

meghan (she/they)

meghan is a mixed race chicana mama who has been unschooling with her family for many years, moved a lot, and experienced many ways to dwell. in recent years she's really leaned into an approach to unschooling that focuses an intersectional lens toward life and learning. because we really aren't free, until we're all free.

she loves deeply and enjoys sitting with new ideas and letting them dance in her brain. she is into gardening, cooking, reading, painting, on occasion she writes a collection of words that feel like poetry but never follows the rules of poetry.

she is passionate about unschooling and even more passionate about community. she's built co-ops + groups, worked in Sudbury and currently she runs a discord server for SDE parents, caregivers and facilitators, hosts support circles (free) and generally holds space with people as she is able between family life, the zine and the podcast. she's not an expert or coach of any kind since she is figuring it all out as it unfolds

Mel Compo

Mel Compo is an artist, writer, and facilitator at the New York City Agile Learning Center (ALC-NYC). They discovered self-directed education at the tail end of their own conventional schooling at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where their thesis explored the intersections of SDE, poetry, and the history of American education.

After a brief stint in corporate America, they found their dream job field tripping, creating, and playing at ALC-NYC. They're passionate about having open and honest discussions with children and other people about bodies, gender, emotional intelligence, brain plasticity, and cycles of growth. You can check out their art on Instagram and writing on their blog.

Michael Maser

Michael Maser completed his PhD in 2023 at Simon Fraser University, BC Canada, focusing his research on the subjective nature of learning. Michael has worked as a K-12 and post-secondary educator for 30+ years, winning a Prime Ministers award in 2007 for his role in co-founding SelfDesign Learning Community, an innovative online school oriented to personalized learning in BC, Canada. Michael has written two books and numerous articles and essays on education, health and resource-related issues, too, reflecting his background as a journalist and scientist. Michael serves as Adjunct Faculty with Antioch University (online) in the Individualized Masters (IMA) program, teaching 'Neurobiology and Learning.' In 2022, Michael joined the 'Prison Math Project' (US-based), contributing a column to the PMP newsletter focused on learning guidance and support. Michael lives in Gibsons BC Canada; his personal website is michaelmaser.net.

Michelle Loucas

Michelle began her career in education over 20 years ago, teaching English in Baltimore and the San Francisco Bay area before moving to Philadelphia. In Philly, she worked supporting student voice in service-learning programs, taught education courses at Temple University, and coordinated the Master's Program in Secondary Education at UPenn.

She became increasingly disturbed by the disconnect between the effort she saw smart, dedicated teachers and students making, and the amount of learning actually occurring. Although her partner, Reb, introduced her to democratic schools early in her career, it wasn't until she spent time with self-directed learners themselves that she became convinced.

In 2002, excited about enabling urban students to direct their own education, Michelle and Reb began assembling the Philly Free School Founders group. PFS opened in 2011. She loves staffing there, where she joins the students in the hard but rewarding work of growing into herself every day.

Mikala Streeter

Mikala Streeter is the Founding Principal of The LIFE School, an accredited, nonprofit high school in Atlanta, that has transformed the traditional high school experience to be more personalized, real world, and exploration-focused.

Prior to founding The LIFE School, Mikala taught middle and high school computer science and math courses for 7 years, designed project-based STEAM curriculum, and coached teachers around the world. She also co-founded an educational technology company focused on college access. She is a 4.0 Schools Founder Advisor and a SXSWedu conference speaker.

Mikala has a B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.A. in Education (Learning, Design, and Technology) from Stanford University.

Mitra Martin

Mitra is a learning experience designer with a focus on cultivating learning communities through facilitating peer-to-peer learning.

Her work in this area began with the project of establishing a learning community in Los Angeles in 2005 focused on using the embodied practice of Argentine tango as a portal for personal and social transformation. Her school, Oxygen Tango, which she directed from 2009-2018, taught improvised connection to thousands, and prototyped innovations in learning design.

Mitra has been a qualitative researcher since 1998. Her research contributes to communications strategies and product designs for organizations including those in the arts, the non-profit sector, maternal & child health, and digital technologies serving youth and families.

Mitra is grateful for her educational experiences, from Montessori to Princeton, while seeing their limitations. Mitra is committed to help foster a healthier world by connecting families with new paradigms of education.

Missy Willis

Missy Willis is an unschooling mom to two kids and the creator of the blog Let 'em Go Barefoot, where she discusses issues related to the social, emotional, and physical well-being of children and families. She has a degree in Psychology with a focus on child development and a masters in Special Education. Over the past two decades she has worked at Duke University Medical Center, North Carolina State University, and public and private schools before falling into homeschooling. In her quest to encourage a kinder world towards children she believes parenting peacefully and educational autonomy are huge components in creating healthier adult/child relationships.

When she isn't writing, researching, or organizing community events, you can find her adventuring with her family, creating, or slowly working through the piles of books stacked by her bed. She can be reached at missywillis@live.com, on Facebook: Let 'em Go Barefoot or Instagram @letemgobarefoot

Nancy Tilton

Nancy Tilton founded ALC Mosaic in August of 2013 and currently serves as the Director of Education and daily facilitator with intermediate ages for the school. She has been studying child development and working with children for 18 years. She graduated high school with 24 early childhood credits through her local community college and then moved on to study Elementary Education at the University of Maryland.

From there she taught in public schools for 3 years, and then moved on to help grow a private Quaker school in Charlotte for 3 years. After these experiences, she decided to embark on an adventure creating a community school that works in collaboration with parents and students, something she didn't see happening in conventional public or private schools.

ALC Mosaic opened in 2013 with 12 students and is currently serving over 70 students as it begins its 6th year in operation. Nancy also piloted the Agile Learning Facilitators summer program in 2014 with Tomis Parker, which has continued to serve adults around the world who are interested in learning about Self-Directed Education & Agile Learning Centers.

Naomi Fisher

Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist and mother of two self-directed learners. She lives in Hove, England. Her children were unschooled for six years, have attended a self-directed school in Paris and now attend the Self Managed Learning College in Hove. She is the author of Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of their Own Learning, published by Little, Brown. She works as a clinical psychologist online.

Ophelia June (they/them)

Ophelia June (they/them) is a 19 year old lifelong unschooler. They hope to work in alternative education one day. They are a multimedia artist with focuses in poetry and colorful illustrations, as well as crochet works ranging from stuffed animals, to blankets. They are working on making a children's book, learning to cook, and finding all the passions that life has to offer.

Özlem Arkun
(she/her)

Özlem Arkun (she/her) is children's advocate, a playworker, and a mother of an unschooler. She has been organising pop up play days, and working on Self-Directed Education, making translations and documentation. She is volunteering in projects such as Tarlabaşı Society Center and Social Circus for the social integration of immigrant children and she is writing for the anarchist journal Meydan, on children's rights and self-directed education, for more than 5 years. She is living in İstanbul, Turkey.

Patrick Farenga (he/him)

Patrick Farenga (he/him) worked closely with the author and teacher John Holt, and published Growing Without Schooling magazine (GWS). GWS was the nation's first periodical about learning without going to school, started by Holt in 1977 and published by Pat until 2001.

Pat speaks as a homeschooling expert at education conferences around the world as well as on commercial radio and television talk shows in the United States (The Today Show, Good Morning America) and abroad.

Pat publishes the website, johnholtgws.com, has three unschooled daughters, who are now adults, and is a founding member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education.

Pat's books include Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Hachette, 2021), The Legacy of John Holt: A Man Who Genuinely Understood, Trusted, and Respected Children (HoltGWS, 2013), and How to Report Unschooling to School Officials (HoltGWS, 2015).

Paul Sippil

Paul Sippil is a former auditor, recovering CPA, and independent registered investment advisor in Chicago who focuses his practice on uncovering the conflicts of interest and excessive fees in employer sponsored retirement plans. He also organizes events through Community Dining, an organization he started in March 2015 aiming to connect people through shared meals that engage us in the means by which we fuel ourselves, stimulate substantive dialogue, and strengthen social bonds.

Peter Gray

Peter Gray, Ph.D., is a research professor at Boston College, author of Free to Learn and the textbook Psychology (now in 8th edition), and founding member of the nonprofit Let Grow. Online: Peter Gray website, Facebook

Rachel Munzig (she/her/hers)

Rachel Munzig lives on occupied Chinook land in Portland, Oregon. She is one of the founders of Alder Commons, a nonprofit community center that serves as a hub for self-directed work and play. Rachel has worked for many years in youth development as an environmental educator, tutor, and mentor. She strives to be an advocate for social & racial justice and children's autonomy.

Rachel and Wilbur Rippy

Wilbur was born in 1923 in Nashville, TN and Rachel in Antwerp , Belgium in 1930. Their paths crossed in New York City in 1953. The dramatic events of World War 2 had brought them there. Rachel and her family found refuge from the Nazis who had overrun large parts of Europe and Wilbur, now a veteran of the fierce Pacific War Theater, moved to New York to attend the New School for Social Research to study English literature under the GI Bill. Rachel graduated from the Great Books program at the University of Chicago.

Both had been educated in conventional elementary and high schools and with some exceptions, were generally not satisfied with their schooling. Both decided to become teachers and found their way to the Bank Street College of Education. Rachel was assigned for an internship in Wilbur's classroom. They found they had much in common, among these was an interest in Summerhill and democratic education.

They teamed up and after a decade of teaching they were able to help found their Fifteenth Street School: their dream school. Eventually, they joined the faculty at the Bank Street College of Education and retired in 1986.

Ramin Farhangi

After doing some consulting for the BCG for 3 years, Ramin realized his thirst for living a happy, meaningful life. He tried teaching Math and Physics in high school for 3 years, where he realized how inefficient the system for children to learn what truly matters in life.

He then discovers democratic schools and more particularly Sudbury schools. He discovers that the French education Law doesn't make school compulsory. He feels like he was cheated all this time, and that there surely exists a healthier way to view education, free from imposed curricula, timetables and age groups.

After reading A.S. Neill's Summerhill and attending a EUDEC Conference in Copenhagen in 2014, he's so convinced that this is the very future of education that he starts up a Sudbury School in Paris with partners he finds along the way. He also encourages the team to develop EUDEC France in parallel by organizing national conferences, paving the way for a whole generation of democratic school projects.

Ramin is known for his TED Talk, Pourquoi j'ai créé une école où les enfants font ce qu'ils veulent (English subtitles available).

Rick Bondy (he/him)

Rick Bondy began his career teaching in a mutli-age classroom and then transitioned into school counseling at a public school serving 4th through 6th graders. In addition, he facilitated anti-bias workshops for the Anti-Defamation League. He also designed and delivered parenting workshops on Creative Conflict Management in Families and on Raising Able Boys.

Before all of that, however, he read Summerhill in his last year of high school, which ignited a belief that children are the best engineers of their own learning. Not only did his professional experiences confirm that but so did coaching teams of diverse groups of kids, including his own daughters, in a program calleld Destination Imagination that proves this idea in a "team-based, creative project competition like no other."

All of that has filled him with a love for children that still burns brightly and fuels a desire to usher all of our children into happy, productive lives.

R.L. Saunders

R.L. Saunders writes middle grade and young adult fiction and is a parent in a his/mine/ours family of 7. In her life before self-directed enlightenment, she developed and directed a learning center at a small university in the Midwest, where she also taught English and humanities. Later, she ran away to a subtropical island and worked as associate editor and columnist for a advocacy newspaper.

Among her greatest regrets is not coming to Self-Directed Education sooner so her oldest children could've known earlier the genuine joy and growth that free children enjoy and all children deserve.

Rubén Darío Alvarado

Rubén Darío Alvarado (México), serves as bridge between persons and their potential-unleashing "Aha!" moments. Attemps to re-dignify Play as the original vehicle for learning.

He has designed and implemented Self-Directed Education models in North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia, for evolving education. Currently facilitating @Educambiando, Agile Learning Center, and playing @ ALC Network Board.

Ruben Whitaker

Ruben Whitaker is a life long unschooler, free schooler, and advocate for self-directed education from Chicago, IL. They have volunteered and interned at Alcove Learning, Lighthouse Holyoke, and their alma mater Tallgrass Sudbury School. They hold a B.A from Bennington College where they studied music and ethnomusicology playing a wide variety of music from Turkish Classical to American Folk. Their songs and compositions focus on everyday life, ecology, nostalgia, and storytelling. You can find their music on all platforms under Ruben Jai.

Sarah Longwell

Sarah Longwell's work as a lactation consultant has given her deeps insights into the many paths people take to find their way as new parents when a baby joins the family. In addition to helping people with the tasks of feeding their babies, Sarah is dedicated to supporting them to question the ways their own experiences and cultural influences impact their parenting choices. Her hope is that encouraging folks to question the "rules" and follow their instincts in the earliest days of their parenting journey will help them build joyous and individualized experiences relationships as their children grow.

Sarah Longwell lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. When Sarah's children were struggling to engage with learning and finding little support in developing interpersonal skills at their well-regarded local public school, Sarah went looking for other options. Her sons have been happily making mistakes and following their instincts at Village Free School since 2013.

Sierra Allen (she/her)

Sierra was raised on both the Kwanlin Dün and Ta'an Kwäch'ä traditional territories (northern Canada) and in the mountains of Costa Rica. She opted-out of conventional schooling at a young age, choosing instead to direct her own learning. She holds a reverence for the beauty of wilderness, and the nurturing of the wild within herself. In 2006 she co-founded a small alternative education center in Costa Rica with her parents, where she facilitated/directed for five years. In 2016, she became acquainted with the Agile Learning Center (ALC) model where she found resonance and community. She became a founding facilitator at Wildwood ALC in North Carolina and later worked at Windsor House, a 48 year-old Democratic School in Vancouver Canada. She has travelled extensively to amplify Self-Directed Education via workshops, presentations, and youth camps.

Recently she has been involved in audiovisual media production through EDiT (Education in Transformation) and the Ecoversities Alliance.

Sifaan Zavahir (he/him)

Sifaan recently pivoted from being a Corporate "Firestarter" to co-founding Schools 4.0 Lanka.

In his 20 years in adult education (creativity, leadership development and team building for youth and corporate audiences) he advocated for, and experimented with, learner-centric approaches in an industry that rewarded teacher-centric practitioners, and that is the same transformation he is bringing to schooling in Sri Lanka by pioneering Self Directed Education through Kinder Republic, a network of micro-schools.

His personal experience with SDE was through AIESEC, the world's largest youth movement, where he abandoned a promising career in informatics (he already had a degree in Engineering and medals at international programming competitions) to kindle a latent interest in training, and found a new calling: curating learning experiences to help people unleash their talents.

Sneh Erande

Driven by curiosity, passion and exploration; Sneh Erande created his own singular educational path. He flourished in an unconventional learning environment with the support of his parents, who helped him explore interests ranging from art to advanced technologies. His quest began by being fascinated with making origami or drawing which eventually led him to programming as well as virtual reality development. Over time, Sneh has broadened his understanding through voice technology internships and VR among others.

Toby Rollo

Toby Rollo, BA (UBC), MA (Victoria), PhD (Toronto) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lakehead University.

Tracy Chait

Tracy Chait is a mother to three rad kids on an unconventional learning path. She has experience teaching within various education models, mostly alternative and experiential, and is passionate about creating community around self-directed education and continuing to learn and unlearn more herself. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Tyler Howard

Tyler Howard is passionate about developing a new education model for Africa, based on equality and community citizenship. He co-founded Thanda in 2008 and designed our unique staff training program, which is rooted in history, literature, art, psychology, and non-violent direct action. Tyler also designed Thanda's Creative Learning Curriculum and assists daily with implementation and educational support. He is an avid surfer, has a mild obsession with used books, and is frequently seen flying past sugarcane fields as he cruises down the windy roads outside of Thanda on his skateboard.

Vicki Rispoli

Vicki is an independent research consultant with a passion for education and creativity. She is dedicated to connecting students and parents to educational opportunities, particularly in areas of science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM).

Vicki received a Bachelor of Science degree in Human Factors Engineering from the United States Air Force Academy in 1987 then served as a Research Psychologist at the Air Force Research Lab in Phoenix, AZ where she focused on learning behavior and visual requirements for flight simulators. She has a Masters of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Arizona State University and worked at Andrews AFB as an industrial engineer. After leaving the Air Force, Vicki dedicated her time to raising her five children. During this period, she learned a great deal about methods and efficacy of various educational models including Montessori and homeschooling. She has worked with lower elementary-aged students at the Montessori School of San Antonio and has directed competition robotics teams and nonprofit organizations dedicated to STEAM education. She has also been an active board and committee member on various health system foundations where she has been the champion of creativity and education.

Vicki currently resides in Pittsburgh and enjoys being part of the Carnegie Mellon University community of parents (Zach '17 CFA/SCS, Bethany '20 CFA Design). She also has younger children who benefit tremendously from the various creative and innovative learning opportunities in Pittsburgh.

William Gillis

William Gillis is a second generation anarchist activist who studies high energy theoretical physics and tends to live at any given time in either Portland or Oakland.

Yaakov Mintz

Yaakov Mintz has been an educator for the past 17 years. He has learned from his students that there exists a great diversity of personalities and styles, and he encourages them to direct their own learning in whatever way possible. He also serves as an Educational Advocate for students who are out of the school system, helping them chart their own path forward.

Yanira Castro

Yanira Castro is a Digital Marketing expert with 20 years of experience in marketing, public relations and branding. She has worked in markets around world and consults with organizations on unifying and creating a strong digital presence.

Yanira has been a keystone to the marketing departments of notable brands including Chipotle Mexican Grill and California Pizza Kitchen.

Yanira volunteers as an Outdoor Afro leader in Charlotte, a national non-profit which creates & inspires Black connections with nature. She participates in national environmental advocacy opportunities, including an eight-day rafting trip to one of the most remote areas in the United States, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Yoni Kallai

Yoni Kallai is big kid who spends most of his time in Brooklyn where he performs, trains and teaches partner acrobatics at The Muse Brooklyn, a circus studio in Bushwick.

Yoni is also a co-founder and summer camp staffer of play:ground, a unique junkyard playground on Governors Island, which allows children to play freely with different materials and items that could be considered as junk, along with tools to allow for building and destroying. Parents are not allowed into the playground and are encouraged to sit back and relax. Yoni firmly believes in the benefits of self directed play and education and works to bring that to as many young people as possible.

Zakiyya Ismail

For the last 25 years, Zakiyya has been experimenting with living and learning in freedom, also known as unschooling. She is an advocate for freedom in education and an advocate for children's rights, specifically in resisting adultism.

Her three children have never been to school, living instead as if the idea of schooling doesn't exist, and she has been tirelessly connecting with and building a community of practitioners walking similar paths, including families wounded by, and looking for sustainable alternatives outside of the school system. She curates the Living Unschooling anthology on her website, where young people are invited to write about their experience in living unschooling. She has been supporting and has been consistently sharing her reflections on the intersections of unschooling with decolonisation, social change and unschooling's foundational role in social justice. Despite the rigor of her ongoing efforts in family and community, Zakiyya has been making herself available to respond to media queries about unschooling in print, radio and television, and has convened the International Learning Reimagined Conferences of 2017 and 2018, both groundbreaking in their own rights with the 2018 conference being the first conference globally to focus on the socio-political dimensions of Unschooling, Decolonisation and Social Change.

Zoe Greenhouse

Zoe Greenhouse was homeschooled up until sixth grade, when she decided she wanted to be normal. She spent the next five years going to school: an international school, a Montessori school, a private school, and a public school. After her tenth grade year, she finally realized conventional education wasn't for her.

Since then, she's been planning a solo thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile long hiking trail up the West Coast. The preparation includes everything from starting social media platforms and designing a website to making and putting together 5-6 months of food to learning about photography and filmmaking and writing about her experiences and goals to taking safety courses and obtaining gear sponsorships. Her goals are to complete the trail, document her journey, and set herself up for a lifetime of adventures.

On completion, Zoe will be a mere 17 years old and hopes to be an inspiration for others to take risks and pursue their dreams.

Zoë Neill Readhead

Zoë Neill Readhead is the daughter of educational pioneer, A. S. Neill.

Zoë Valerie

Zoë Valerie has been teaching all ages for 20 years and is a mother. Children teach her a raw, uncompromising respect for human nature. She is a dance and movement practitioner and teacher, co-founder of EUDEC Greece, the originator of Ensoma and the founder of an inter-age theater collective based on democratic council active in theatre practice and research.

Her concerns are freedom of choice in educational matters, open scores, art not only for art's sake, theatrical alchemy and integrating the arts of movement, sound and touch into education.