MICROCOLLEGE: The Thoreau College Podcast

Elizabeth (Libby) Sanders is the Executive Director of Camphill Academy, which offers tuition-free higher education in anthroposophic inclusive social development. Her academic work at the intersection of ecology and spirituality in America initially led her to the Camphill movement in 2011. In the interim, she has conducted research on public policy and disability services, models of communal living, inclusion in communal contexts, and critical anthroposophic research methodologies alongside her work in Camphill. Libby lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with her partner, Clayton, and their cats.https://camphill.edu/https://research.camphill.edu/

Kroka Expeditions is a non-profit wilderness expedition school and organic farm that fosters a living relationship with the natural world and the development of skilled, compassionate, and community-minded young people.Working with youth ages 9 to 19, Kroka provides unique wilderness programs centered around the cultivation of consciousness and altruistic will. The container of multi-day expeditions traveling through wild places is one that pushes us as human beings to experience vulnerability and reliance on community (both human and non-human). In return, we are rewarded with humility, compassion, elation, a sense of reverence for the natural world, and a deep feeling of belonging.Grounded on 120 beautiful acres of forest, wetland, and farmland in Marlow, NH, the Kroka Village has grown over the years to become an intentional community of residential staff, a biodynamic farm, and a basecamp that supports the magic of learning and growth to happen. Offering 8-weeks of summer programs, spring and fall programs for school groups, and two semester programs, the Kroka Village is a bustling place!Ezra Fradkin: A New England native, Ezra grew up in an intentional community in Amherst, Massachusetts. After high school Ezra attended Kroka’s Ecuador Semester and went on to study sustainable food systems at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, VT. He completed an MA in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College (UK) in 2021. Ezra joined the Kroka team in 2016 has since held roles from expedition leader, program administrator, campus manager and is currently serving as a co-director.Liz Jordan: Liz joined Kroka 4 years ago, and is currently the semester director. She grew up in northern Virginia, and has worked as an educator--in classrooms, in the wilderness, and in yoga studios--throughout her adult life. Liz has studied many things in formal classroom settings, but feels the most alive and joyful when moving her body outside and crafting. Liz currently lives in Vermont with her husband, their 2 children and other adorable creatures.Kroka Expeditions: https://kroka.org/Thoreau College: www.thoreaucollege.orgDriftless Folk School: www.driftlessfolkschool.org

Chris Higgins is Professor and Chair in the Department of Formative Education in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College where he co-directs the BA program in Transformative Educational Studies and the Ph.D. program in Formative Education. A philosopher of education, he has written on the existential dimensions of teaching and learning, the idea of education as a public good; humanism and liberal learning; imagination and aesthetic education; practice and vocational formation, and the experimental tradition in higher education. He is the author of two books, The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional Practice (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and Undeclared: A Philosophy of Formative Higher Education (MIT Press, 2024).PDF of Chris' book Undeclared: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5780/UndeclaredA-Philosophy-of-Formative-HigherAmazon link to purchase physical copy: https://a.co/d/buF1N3IRomance and Reality of Vocation: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/research/virtues/magazine-home-fall-2025/the-romance-and-reality-of-vocational-fit/Thoreau College: www.thoreaucollege.orgDriftless Folk School: www.driftlessfolkschool.org

Over the past several months, Thoreau College has marked several milestones in our growth and development. As of this year, we are now able to offer transferable college credits for our summer and gap semester programs through a new partnership with Prescott College. And this summer we will be welcoming several students from Oberlin College and Stanford University to Wisconsin as interns and participants in our July Driftless Field School program through exciting new partnerships with those schools. Find out more about Thoreau College and apply to the Metamorphosis Gap Semester on our website www.thoreaucollege.orgOn this episode of the podcast we meet two people who have had a big impact on the growth and development of Thoreau College while exploring our unique Scholar-in-Residence program which enables scholars (or artists) to participate in Thoreau College as teachers and mentors for up to a year at a time while working on major research and/or creative projects of their own.Benjamin Bernard-Herman was the 2023-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence and is currently serving as a Thoreau College Faculty member as one of the lead instructors of our 2025 Driftless Field School summer program. He is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois-Chicago whose dissertation research is focused on the spiritual and ethical beliefs and ideas that inform the lives and decisions of people engaging in small scale agriculture here in the Driftless Region, including members of the Amish community and back-to-the-land movement, and practitioners of biodynamics.Julia Buskirk was the 2024-2024 Thoreau College Scholar-in-Residence, as well as a past participant in our Fellowship program in 2021. A native of Milwaukee and a graduate of UW-Madison, Julia has spent the past year teaching and mentoring Thoreau College students while conducting archival and oral history research for her forthcoming historical novel which is focused on agriculture and ecology here in the Driftless Region during the era of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.Learn more about our Residency program here: https://thoreaucollege.org/residencies/

For this episode of the podcast I spoke with Craig Holdrege and Ryan Shea of the Nature Institute in Ghent, New York about the theory and practice of a very different way of doing science, informed and inspired by the work of the great German poet, scientist, and statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In contrast to the reductionist paradigm of science as it is often practiced elsewhere today, the Goethean approach seeks a perspective on nature characterized by wholeness and interconnection through a sensitive and self-aware methodology in which the relationships between the phenomena and the observer are not forgotten. Craig was a visiting instructor at Thoreau College in 2020 and we are very excited to welcome Ryan to Wisconsin as guest instructor this coming spring during our Spring 2025 Metamorphosis Gap Semester.Craig Holdrege is the Nature Institute’s director and spearheaded its founding in 1998. His passion is to develop what Goethe called “delicate empiricism” — an approach that learns from nature how to understand nature and is infused with a cautious and critical awareness of how intentions and habits of mind affect human understanding. Craig carries out studies of animals and plants that tell the story of these organisms as dynamic and integrated beings within the larger web of life. He has written many articles and books, including Seeing the Animal Whole—And Why It Matters, Do Frogs Come from Tadpoles? and Thinking Like a Plant. Before co-founding The Nature Institute, Craig was a high school biology teacher in Waldorf Schools, working in Germany for 12 years and then in the U.S. for nine years. Since the early 1990s, Craig has been involved in teacher training. Craig has a Ph.D. in sustainability education from Prescott College in Arizona. He completed a Masters-level, non-degree program in phenomenological science at the Science Research Laboratory at the Goetheanum, Switzerland, and has a B.A. in philosophy from Beloit College.Ryan Shea taught at Providence College for eight years, including courses in philosophy of science, environmental philosophy, and nature writing. He has B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy. He brings to his work at The Nature Institute a broad knowledge of ancient philosophical biology (especially Aristotle), the scientific revolution, phenomenology, German idealism, and Goethean qualitative science. Ryan has been interested in Goethean Science since he was a teenager. He began working part-time for The Nature Institute in spring 2023 and is full-time as of September 2024. He is excited to now have the opportunity to develop Goethean practice through research and teaching. He is interested in pursuing the nature of metamorphosis in different realms of the living world, and what it means to read the “book of nature.” Nature Institute: https://www.natureinstitute.org/Metamorphosis Gap Semester - Spring 2025 - https://thoreaucollege.org/metamorphosis-spring/

This week on the podcast we spoke with Drs. Rutger Engels and Ginie Servant-Miklos, who recently staged the "Bildung Climate School," a part-type summer pilot program in Rotterdam, the Netherlands that draws inspiration from the model of the Danish folk high school as described by Lene Rachel Andersen in The Nordic Secret as well as from the microcolleges in the United States. Carefully structured from a research perspective to test pedagogical strategies and program impacts for future prototypes and initiatives, the Bildung Climate School brought together students from differing tracks of the Netherlands' highly stratified post-secondary education system for 2 hours per day for 9 weeks during the summer of 2024. The program they experienced put into practice elements of what Ginie calls "the pedagogies of collapse," combining a frank examination of the sobering ecological and economic challenges facing humanity with embodied artistic and social practices and techniques for working through anxiety, building community, and even having fun.Ginie Servant-Miklos is an engaged environmental educator with fifteen years of experience in education practice, research, and advocacy. She currently holds an Assistant Professorship in behavioural sciences at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her research and education work focuses on developing innovative pedagogies for societal impact. She developed the Experimental Pedagogics educational design framework, co-founded the Bildung Climate School with Prof. Rutger Engels, and is the author of Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know It. She is a Senior Fellow of the Comenius Network for educational innovators in the Netherlands. She is the founder and chair of the board of the FairFight Foundation, an organisation that provides girls and women from Zambia, Zimbabwe, and India with the mental and physical benefits of martial arts practice, as well as educational support. Ginie is a vocal activist for sustainability and gender equality, advocating for change through public engagements like TEDx talks, debates, podcasts, and other digital media outlets. Ginie obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Kent, an LLM in International Law from Kent Law School, an MA in International Relations from Sciences Po Lille, a PhD in Education Philosophy and Psychology from Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a post-doctoral research grant in Sustainability Education from Aalborg University. She was also a visiting professor in Experimental Pedagogics at Tyumen University.Rutger Engels, PhD, is an award-winning full professor in Developmental Psychopathology, at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR), and a board member of the venture philanthropy ‘De Verre Bergen’. Dr Engels received his MA in Psychology at the University of Groningen, his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Maastricht, followed by a post-doc at Utrecht University. In 2001, he was appointed as a professor in Nijmegen. From 2014-2018, he was CEO of the Trimbos Institute, the National Institute for Mental Health and Addictions, and a distinguished professor in Developmental Psychopathology at Utrecht University. From 2018-2021, he was Rector Magnificus of EUR, one of the top public research universities of Europe. Currently, he is cofounding a specialized mental health clinic on psychedelic-assisted treatments. His fundamental and applied research focuses on mental health and substance use in adolescents and adults. In the last decades, he has coordinated programs aiming to design, test, and ship (technology-enabled) interventions for mental health, addictions, resiliency, and personal growth.