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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. |