Jonathan Code

Jonathan Code.  During a childhood and youth spent in Southern Ontario, regular immersion in and on the freshwater lakes of Frontenac Park fostered in me a deep ecological and place-based awareness of the natural world. I am to this day never more at home than in a canoe on a lake at dawn, paddling out as the sun rises and the loons call forth the day.

My ecological interests grew and deepened through encounters with the work of Goethe, Schumacher, Vine Deloria Jr., and Steiner—whose contributions to education, medicine, human development, and agriculture (Biodynamic farming) continue to inform my teaching, research, and writing to this day.

I am particularly interested in the contribution that Goethe can make to ecological thinking (which I addressed in a study of Goethe’s method of exact imagination as applied to the Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa)) and in how the Biodynamic preparations are not only stimulants for good composting processes but are also catalysts for a deepening of agricultural consciousness (which I address in Muck and Mind: Encountering Biodynamic Agriculture, 2014).

I am currently engaged in a study of traditional fire-craft and its affordances for educational philosophy and praxis. This study grows out of a deep concern for education in the twenty first century (see Crafting: Transforming Materials and the Maker, 2019)—a concern that what is too often left out in many of our educational endeavors is a sense for who a human being is…and what we can (potentially) become.