Stella brings her personal passion to the co-creation of Imagining Learning as the culmination of her life’s work in the sciences, education, leadership development, personal transformation and culture change.



As Learning Steward, Stella’s rich palette of training and experience is being brought to a number of specific aspects. As the Listening Sessions unfold, she is taking the lead on analyzing the data of what young people seek in their education, defining the emergent themes and bringing together their collective story.  The aspirations of the young people who participate is leading our formulation of a new learning system that defines the approach to teaching, the qualities of the learning community, the nature of teacher-learner relationships and the life-capacities young people seek to learn.



Stella is also leading the design of a curriculum for “being” that integrates the collective voice of the young with the emergent understanding of whole-person development across a range of academic disciplines, indigenous knowledge and consciousness studies.  The “being curriculum” is intended for the development of steward-teachers whose primary foci are to steward students through their multi-year learning trajectory and to generate a learning culture that seeds and incubates ways of being and doing consistent with manifesting a community and a world that young people envision and hunger for.  



From the time she was an undergraduate Stella has been designing experiential learning programs in different capacities.  She began with environmental and nature studies for high school students, Stella brings a rare gift and a unique range of skills to the design and facilitation of learning experiences - from the practical to the transpersonal.  teachers and the general public. 



Her natural abilities were augmented with training in adult education, experiential design theory and a fifteen-year career in designing and leading a range of learning programs.  These included personal awareness retreats for the public, leadership development programs for technical professionals and managers, and multi-year culture change journeys in corporations. 

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Her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees were in the natural sciences, but much of her work consisted of leading inter-disciplinary projects in natural resource management.  The holistic nature of this work opened opportunities for her to develop her natural interests in understanding how human dynamics influence outcomes in any human endeavor.



Her professional experience as team leader and creator of leadership programs for her colleagues, led to career opportunities in organizational behavior and organizational learning.  She was one of the founding members and the first research director of the Society for Organizational Learning and a research associate at MIT.  In that capacity Stella led a program of consulting and research into the success and impacts of large-scale change programs and learning approaches within academic, financial, government organizations and corporations.

 

Her understanding of what ignites and engages learning in people is grounded deeply in experience.  Stella has been a dedicated student of consciousness for over 25 years through meditation, teaching and study.  For the past fifteen years she has worked with individuals and groups as a coach, facilitator and counselor – that is, as a companion on their journeys to make meaning of their lives, to transform unwanted patterns of behavior, and to adopt new perspectives that support growth and healing. 

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The unifying thread of Stella’s journey through the sciences, personal development and consciousness studies, has been her life-long calling to discover and offer to others universal principles and trans-cultural practices that foster the highest potential, natural gifts and authentic self-expression within each individual.