In this episode Mark interviews Diane Devenyi, a former tax lawyer who shifted her focus to education reform, and her new book Dear Genius, Harness the Hidden Power in your ABCs.
Prior to the main segment, Mark reads comments from recent episodes, invites listeners to submit reflections for forthcoming episode 300 welcomes new patrons and shares a few words about this episode's sponsor.
You can learn more about how you can get your audiobooks distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway.
During their chat, Mark and Diane talk about:
- Diane's start in a non-creative realm, with the belief she was going to be a tax lawyer
- Publicly announcing at an educational meeting that she was there to re-vamp education on the planet back in 1999
- Universal design: AKA "Learning for everyone"
- How the current education system was built to support an earlier century of humans -- ie, creating workers rather than thinkers
- The Alvin Toffler Quote: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
- Working on ways to shift things when it comes to education
- How easy it is to resolve some issues when you know what underlying element you're looking for
- The way Diane's book "Dear Genius" helps
- How to make Diane's method work in larger sized classroom settings, including doing it with 80 campers at one time in a summer camp setting
- Going to get her Masters of Education and how that led to having to put the summer camp on hold
- The concept of having families experience this together in an immersive setting
- Part of the process of actually learning/relearning the letters of the alphabet using clay
- Deciding to take on partner dancing later in life and how that completely changed her life
- A Grade 4 experience that taught Diane that they don't want to know what her best is, but they wanted her to be the best at what they wanted her to do
- Why, even if a person uses a typewriter and never hand-writes letters, how going back to the foundation of properly printing letters can make a significant difference
- From your hand, through your heart, and into your head
- Gaining a sense of resilience from unlearning and relearning something
- The March 2023 2-Day Boot Camps Diane is running online
- When your curiosity in life gets a kickstart
- And more...
After the episode Mark reflects on the importance of unlearning and relearning regardless of your age or how much you believe you might already have learned, and how he is planning on doing that to continue to grow as a writer and a person.
Links of Interest:
Diane Devenyi, LLB, MEd, is a former tax lawyer who shifted her focus to education reform when she became deeply troubled by learning struggles she observed in her children’s classrooms. This has become her life-long passion. With more than 20 years in the field, she is sharing her observations about literacy and learning in a "Dear Genius" series of books, with "Harness the Hidden Power in Your ABCs!" being the first. Her hope is that children and adults everywhere can finally find relief and the freedom to soar in their own zone of genius.
The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
