Session 5, 1:30: Imagining the Possibilities
Heather MacTaggart, Announcer Carl Rust
Grace Workman-Porecki
Grace’s education journey from unschooling to public schooling to a hybrid of both provides her with firsthand experience. She is driven to help people along their journey. She feels that learning happens all day, every day, and that all people should be allowed and encouraged to have input in their education. She looks forward to a future where education can utilize a variety of opportunities including unschooling, homeschooling, public school, and community engagement. She loves hearing about innovative ideas for how we can make school and education better for every person.
Heather MacTaggart
Heather MacTaggart is a social entrepreneur, educator, author, innovator and consensus builder. She began her private sector career at Proctor and Gamble where, over the course of seven years, she held progressively senior marketing and management positions. She thereafter applied her expertise to establish a unique consulting hub.
Through her leadership, Classroom Connections evolved from a grass-roots resource for schools to a social enterprise dedicated to educational transformation. Classroom Connections is now a respected source of leading edge, government sponsored, training curricula in use across Canada and around the world. Corporate sponsors include RBC and 3M.
Along the way, Heather and her team also designed practical, life-changing programs to engage at risk indigenous youth. Ultimately, Classroom Connections spawned the revolutionary Change It Up! platform, with Heather on the front lines at First Nation reserves, providing self-development and employment skills to young women and men who had previously dropped out. This platform spawned the widely distributed CIU! Toolkit: an easy-to-implement program based on a decade of practical field experience in the delivery of employment, pre-employment and life skills training.
As the Executive Director of Classroom Connections, and as the Canadian Deputy of The 21st Century Learning Initiative, Heather consistently inspired disparate groups to enthusiastically support innovative change in education. In 2010, she co-authored Overschooled but Undereducated with John Abbott in the UK.
Her newest and most exciting venture is Unschooling School which, with the support of an international cast of diverse and free-thinking academics, promotes a quiet revolution which will permanently alter the systemic rigidity of schooling. Unschooling School unleashes the freedom to learn in a thoughtfully considered but bold encounter with stale and traditional teaching methods.
Heather is a creative and dynamic change agent, fostering both growth and disruption in the learning environment. Her influence at the highest levels of government and business has made a meaningful difference in the lives of marginalized young Canadians.
Carl Rust
Carl is a retired educator who spent 30 years in public education as a teacher, assistant principal and Director of Elkhart Elementary Academy, a self-directed learning program for public school elementary students. He has studied revolutionary schools and programs around the world and is the author of Get Out of the Way and Let Kids Learn, How We Can Transform Schools and Reintroduce Natural Learning. He is currently Educational Facilitator at Woodlawn Nature Center in Elkhart Indiana and a member of Woodlawn Learning Community, a group of learners of all ages that work and play together naturally in nature. He is also an advisor and consultant with the Unschooling School group that advises families, younger learners, teachers, administrators, and schools on how to better meet the needs of all learners in the 21st Century.