Wendy Priesnitz is a book author, award winning
journalist, editor, former broadcaster, social
entrepreneur, and mother of two adult daughters. She is the owner of
Life Media,
which she co-founded with her husband Rolf in 1976 as
The
Alternate Press to publish books and
Natural Life Magazine.
Wendy is an agent of change who, when she was barely out
of her teens, recognized the need for rethinking how we work, play and educate
ourselves in order to restore the planet’s social and ecological balance.
For the last forty years, her mission has been to help people understand the
interconnections within the web of life on Earth and to encourage them to
challenge the assumptions inherent in the often conflicting choices we make in
our daily lives.
In her quest to inspire, support and live grassroots
change, she has been at the leading edge of (and ahead of it, in some cases)
many progressive trends and movements. She is recognized as a pioneer in
independent publishing, unschooling, environmentally sustainable business
practices, home-based and women-owned business, and green politics. Her work
is rooted in her experience of motherhood, which taught her about the
emotional, social, cultural, economic, educational, and environmental
responsibilities involved with bringing a child into this world.
Trained as a school teacher in 1969, Wendy quickly
rejected the factory model of processing children and became an early
proponent of experience-based, self-directed learning (now
called "unschooling" or, as she prefers, "life learning"). She founded The
Canadian Alliance of Homeschoolers in 1979 as a national support and advocacy
organization that kick-started the homeschooling movement in Canada,
cooperating with John Holt as he breathed life into a parallel movement in
America. In 1987, Wendy wrote
School Free – The Homeschooling Handbook,
which is now in its fifth edition and has become a best selling classic around
the world.
Her more recent book on that subject,
Challenging
Assumptions in Education
(2000), is a controversial look at what’s wrong
with public education and at the hows and whys of deschooling
our families and society. It is on the
reading list for college education programs internationally and was updated
and reissued in 2008.
In 2002, as a way of encouraging and supporting families
to trust their children to learn without being taught, she founded
Life
Learning Magazine.
She also edited the book
Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier
, a collection of
essays from Life Learning magazine, which was published in late 2008.
Under her co-leadership, Natural Life Magazine continues
to help its readers to integrate life learning and natural parenting, green
living, sustainable housing, socially and environmentally responsible
self-employment, organic gardening and natural healing into an ecologically
responsible lifestyle.
That work led to her being recruited to a successful
run at the leadership of the Green Party of Canada in 1996. Her work in politics and journalism has given Wendy an
understanding of the environmental and social dangers inherent in the
globalized corporate mindset and of the transformative power of local small
business, social entrepreneurship, and "unjobbing."
In the mid 1980s, she began to help life learning families create
home-based businesses – as she and Rolf had done a decade earlier in order
to unschool their own daughters. So she founded The Home Business Network, a
source of advocacy, information, and support for home-based businesses,
helped legitimize and legalize home business, taught women to start home businesses, hosted a small business television
show, and, for a decade, wrote a weekly small business newspaper column. Her
book
Bringing it Home – A Home Business Start-Up Guide for You and Your
Family was published in 1996 and is still helping people to plan
home businesses and to balance work and family life.
As a continuation of Wendy's work with young
parents, in 2008, she and Rolf launched Natural Child Magazine, a spinoff from the Natural Child
column published in Natural Life Magazine beginning in 1992. Wendy
edits and produces it now as a digital journal.
A prolific writer, Wendy has contributed essays and chapters to
dozens of texts and popular books including Linda Dobson's
The Homeschooling Book
of Answers:
The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling's Most Respected
Voices and AERO's
Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories.
Her tenth book Natural Life Magazine's Green & Healthy
Homes has just been published. She is also a poet, with two
published books of poetry, and a blogger. She is currently trying to find
time to finish her eleventh book, a collection of memoir-style essays about
learning, mothering and daughtering, entitled It Hasn't Shut Me Up, as well as
an unnamed book about why self-education is the way of the future. She
prides herself on writing from a position of solid experience, rather than
of academic research, and aims for plainness, conciseness, and clarity in
her style.
One of the hallmarks of Wendy’s life and work is her
belief in cooperation over competition and she has served on
the boards of countless non-profit organizations and
provided advice and mentoring to many businesswomen. In recent
years, in an attempt to slow down, simplify her life, and make more room for
writing, she has lessened her level of participation in that regard.
Wendy is listed in the
Canadian Who's Who
and the
Who's Who of Canadian Women.
Read a
history of Wendy's unschooling/life learning experiences published in the book Turning
Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories.
Read an interview with Wendy published in
Life
Learning Magazine.
Listen to an interview with Wendy on the
Inspired Parenting Radio Show.