Emily Hoyler
Q: Where are your roots deepest? What is your story? How did you get involved with your work?
A: My roots are deepest here, in what’s now known as Vermont. I grew up in Addison County in the fields and forests and ponds of Cornwall, East Middlebury, and in the Middlebury River.
My story is that I spent a lot of time outside as a kid. It was part escape, part imaginative play, and part exploration. I had a few educators, in my school experience, who also took us outside and kindled this relationship with the natural world. I remember in second grade, my teacher took us out and had us find a tree and hug the tree and do a bark rubbing. We had to visit the tree throughout the year and look at the changes, taking time to build a relationship with it.
While I now know Dr. Seuss to be problematic, The Lorax was hugely influential on me as a kid and helped me understand that idea that I had a responsibility to care about the world and the state of things. I chose to act through education. I started teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, in a charter school, teaching middle school English/language arts. I started to bring what I would now call farm-to-school experiences into my teaching, taking kids apple picking, trying to bring climate change into my curriculum.
My husband and I wanted to come home and raise our family here. We had two kids in Rhode Island, and our third was born when we got back here. I began looking for work here, and I found a job at Shelburne
Farms. That’s the origin story of a lot that’s come since then. I learned about education for sustainability, which I think could be another way of talking about perenniality, with some probably nuanced differences, but very much the same spirit. I was at Shelburne Farms full time for two years, and then took that framework to Middlebury College and spent three semesters teaching there. After that, I went back to teaching K–12, and I taught in Cornwall again, and circling back, I was able to put all these learnings into practice. It’s very much about meaningful and engaging learning—being connected deeply to place in human and natural communities, understanding interdependence and interconnectedness, and learning now to make a difference here and now to understand our own efficacy and agency.
From there, I wanted to get back into working with educators. The Tarrant Institute had been focusing on middle-level education, and while not really identifying it as education for sustainability, it was about engaging, meaningful, and relevant learning for young people. A lot of that is rooted in place to make a difference, so I was able to bring that lens and do EFS work here, where I’ve been for the last five to six years, partnering with schools to embed professional development and to help teachers shift their practices.
It’s about shifting the relationships about the ways we wield power in the classroom. The work with teachers is a lot about connecting to place, connecting with community partners like the Vermont Folklife Center or the Vermont Energy Education Program. The education for sustainability framework is centered around rooting in our human and natural communities, understanding systems and interdependence, and making a difference. It seems like the balm for despair. Whether I am working with adults or young people, it’s how I am operating now.
Q: How do you see perenniality in your organization?
A: Relationships. There’s a seasonal cycle; there are relationships over time. I keep coming back to relationships and this idea of prepositions. Robin Wall Kimmerer has been talking a lot about pronouns, but I am thinking a lot about prepositions—with, in, for, about. That to me is the connection. It’s not the stuff, but our relationships to the stuff—the network of relationships that create conditions for that. When I think of my garden, an annual comes and goes, although there is still an intergenerational capacity as these poppies drop their seeds and the new crops come up. I think about muellin and burdock as biennials, and then I think about berry bushes and fruit trees who come back over and over again. What are the conditions and the long-term commitment to being rooted in a place? How do you adapt as things change?
Q: What is one recent learning, unlearning, or relearning you have experienced or explored?
A: I am unlearning patterns of coloniality and white supremacy in myself. I planted tulip bulbs last fall in a color pattern and in a straight line, and when they came up this spring, it looked ridiculous. There was something about my brain that told me that I put things in order by putting them in a straight line and putting them in a pattern. It’s not good or bad, but I noticed how deep that tendency was in me. I am trying to find those ways that I am operating on autopilot. That example is pretty neutral, and it just made me laugh, but there are other ways I could be doing it that might be causing harm. I’ve been really inspired by a book called Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. It’s an amazing book, and it has been helping me grapple with complexities within myself, so I can hold the complexities of the world a little better.
Emily Hoyler is an educator, facilitator, mother, partner, and mountain dweller. Her work centers on transforming herself and the systems she is enmeshed within toward justice, joy, and sustainability. She is currently the managing director at the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, as well as a professional affiliate with Shelburne Farms. Emily has worked as an educator/learner for over two decades, as a classroom teacher (grades three to eight and undergraduate), environmental educator, curriculum specialist, and facilitator of professional learning and systems change. Her current interests include unsettling self/systems, critical pedagogies, education for sustainability, compassionate systems awareness and social fields, community-engaged learning, place-based learning, youth leadership, climate justice, and middle-level education.
Emily cowrote Shelburne Farms’ Cultivating Joy and Wonder, an early childhood curriculum guide to educating for sustainability. She has also served as a visiting lecturer in education studies at Middlebury College. She is a current doctoral student in the University of Vermont’s Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Leadership, Creativity and Sustainability program, and holds a BSc in geography from the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada, and an MEd in administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University. She delights in weaving these interests and experiences together in perpetual pursuit of vitality and resilience.