Amy Seefeldt

Current CV available here.

I am fundamentally a starter. Most recently, that has involved starting my own LLC and working with a business partner across the world to create and share a framework and tools for authentic collaboration in teams. My first teaching job involved coming in at the start of one of the city of Atlanta's first  private schools dedicated to bringing about increased racial and socioeconomic equity. When I took on the job of Academic Dean & Deputy Head of Woodstock School, the 164 year-old institution was tired, with a chaotic accumulation of policies,  redundant (and also conflicting) curriculum maps, and a largely anxious faculty. I enjoyed working with the Principal to bring coherence, order and a measure of calm to the life of the school through uniting people around a common vision for education. After six years as Deputy Head, I wanted a new challenge, which came in the form of founding the Centre for Imagination at Woodstock School. The Centre is an initiative dedicated to catalyzing deep change in our wider model of learning and teaching. It emerged from my study of Ecological Design Thinking, which has helped me develop a profound commitment both to the need for change and to a set of beliefs about the way transformation can be sparked and nurtured. As side projects in recent years, I have brought and coordinated the AP Capstone Diploma program at Woodstock, along with serving as Woodstock's inaugural Theory of Knowledge Coordinator in the IBDP. I worked as Head of Innovation at the Escuela Americana in San Salvador, El Salvador, to introduce change there.

I love coherence, co-design, and working to infuse every aspect of education with meaning. Whether working to facilitate strategic planning for institutions or designing a lesson for my college class, I am committed to embedding each moment within a meaningful context. In addition to reorienting education to teach young people to think in systems, assuming embeddedness and interdependence, one key to a thriving future is for us all to connect or reconnect with nature around us. Pat of my work involves facilitating these connections. We have no choice but to fundamentally shift our paradigm of learning and teaching, if we want to send young people out into the world who are resilient, focused, and empowered; who are able to confidently navigate rising tides of nationalism, migration, and climate change.

I foster community. As an American who grew up in New Delhi in the eighties, I witnessed first-hand the atrocities that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. I learned through experience how the lines of community can be drawn through an inclusive pluralism or an exclusive fundamentalism. From my own school days through my years in the classroom as a history teacher (both in Atlanta and in India) and in the last decade of experience as a senior administrator at Woodstock School and the Escuela Americana, and then launching my own LLC, I have worked to gather, understand, and filter as many perspectives as possible. In the last few years, after studying new methods of co-design, I have become unshakably convinced that we are infinitely wiser together than we are alone--though extracting and applying the wisdom held in a diverse community is not a simple task. It requires deep skills of hosting, listening, welcoming difference, and systems thinking.

I work towards purpose. The Japanese concept of ikigai roughly translates as 'reason for being'. I painted this word and the facets of its definition on the wall beside the door of the Centre for Imagination, my recent project at Woodstock School, in the Himalayas.  When I moved to El Salvador, I photographed that same painting, framed it, and hung it in my office as a reminder. I then went on in 2021 and 2022 to lead workshops on how to cultivate meaning in life at Furman University for students and for alumni at the point of retirement. The heart of education, for me, lies in guiding each person towards discovering or fashioning their unique place in the world, the place where they can flourish and, in turn, give life to their surroundings. Educators, too, continually need to rediscover their profound place in the lives of people they teach and learn with, not to mention their place in shaping our collective future. This demands a great deal from education leaders--far beyond the admittedly important tasks of keeping systems running and test scores rising, leaders possess the charisma to inspire and the determination to guard the core identity of a professional learning community.

I have lived almost 31 of my 49 years outside of my "home" country and joined boarding school at the age of ten. This life experience has bred in me the confidence to work with complexity, the comfort to live with cultural ambiguity, and the creativity to find paths forward through significant challenges. I work to cultivate these same qualities in students and staff.

Education blog: (Re)Imagining Our Future