Hi, my name is Karen! I study and share ways to support teachers and other adults to become innovators in all kinds of learning spaces.

Raising and learning with my own daughters showed me that primary school education is wildly behind the times – literally stuck in the 19th century – and I became interested in changing that.

As the climate crisis morphed into a climate catastrophe before our very eyes, I also became more involved in finding ways to transition our society towards greater sustainability.

In 2014 I co-founded a free school in Denmark called the Green Free School. The school focused on daily joy, outdoor schooling and sustainability. During the five years it took to get the school under way we developed a sustainable pedagogy founded on sensory-based learning, outdoor schooling and self-led learning. All our learning activities were organized in inter-disciplinary projects. Arts and crafts, social and emotional learning, and traditional academic subjects were weighted equally.

My work at the school focused on fostering a supportive environment for the school’s adults to explore new ways of learning with children. I also experimented with creating structures and procedures to make such an innovative environment permanent and evolved professional development processes for the teachers.

After leaving the Green Free School I myself went back to school for a Master’s in learning processes and continued to give talks and workshops about our work at the school. Visit SnailAcademy.dk to read more, and click here for workshops and lectures, and here for my CV.