Our school was inspired by the work of R. Buckminster Fuller. Bucky insisted that we teach children to think comprehensively and that we encourage them to seek out those individuals who were leaders in their field. In 1980, Bucky visited our school and took part in a film documentary entitled, “Learning As A Journey”. That experience led us to invite a number of ‘world teachers’ to our campus to inform and inspire us. Over the years we have developed contacts with several people who have taken our ‘Upland Hills School’ into their hearts and have been invited to return year after year. We honor these wonderful people by calling them our global teachers. They open our minds and our souls with their stories, music and wisdom. They inspire us to connect with each other, with the natural world, and with people from distant lands. They travel widely and come to us as emissaries, bringing their collective wisdom and experiences. It is a great honor to include them as part of our staff. We hope you will follow their their links to find out more about their work and their performance schedules, including those at Upland Hills School and the Karen Joy Theater.

Eugene Friesen

   Eugene is at the forefront of a new generation of musicians versed in classical, popular and world music. A graduate of the Yale School of Music, he is an active performer, composer, teacher and recording artist. He was awarded a Grammy as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for the 1994 album Spanish Angel.

   Friesen’s gift for the responsive flow of improvisatory music has been featured in concerts all over the world with the Paul Winter Consort, Trio Global, and with poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Coleman Barks. He has performed as a soloist at the International Cello Festival in Manchester, England; Recontres d’Ensembles de Violoncelles in Beauvais, France; and at the World Cello Congress in Baltimore, Maryland.

   His compositional credits include: four albums of original music, In The Shade Of Angels, New Friend, Arms Around You and The Song Of Rivers; Grasslands, a symphony premiered on the Kansas prairie in 1997; Earth Requiem: Stories of Hope; The Brementown Musicians with Bob Hoskins; and Sabbaths, settings of poems by Wendell Berry.

   CelloMan, his one-man show for young audiences, features a wide variety of music on solo cello: classical, jazz, blues and rock. Created in collaboration with maskmaker/choreographer Robert Faust, CelloMan has been performed widely across the United States, as well as for the children at Upland Hills School.  We were also privileged and excited to highlight the opening season of the Karen Joy Theatre with the newest Eugene & Robert collaboration, Voice of the Wood.

   Eugene Friesen is on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Wendy, and their children.

http://www.celloman.com/

Rafe Martin

   Rafe is the author of nearly 20 books and the recipient of three American Library Association Notable Book Awards, Four Parent’s Choice Awards, two Anne Izard Storyteller’s Choice Awards, an American Folklore Society Aesop’s Accolade Award, several American Bookseller “Picks of the Lists”, an IRA Teacher’s Choice Award and many other awards of distinction. His work has been cited in Time Magazine, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and USA Today. The Women’s National Book Association has honored him with their Lucille Micheels Pannell Award for his “unique creativity in bringing children and books together.”

   Rafe appears in countless schools, libraries, festivals, and conferences in nearly every state in the U.S., and as far away as Japan. His books have been translated into many languages including Swedish, French, Korean, Japanese, Xhosa, Zulu, Afrikaans and Portuguese.

   In schools (including our own) he works with all grades and ages, kindergarten through college and adult, telling stories and sharing an empowering vision of language, writing, creativity, and imagination. He leaves listeners with an awareness of their own power to create. He offers adult and family performances, as well as professional workshops.

   Rafe explains his how his love for sharing literature with children began, “through sharing stories each night with [my children] - usually reading aloud but sometimes telling stories - I began to understand how stories, when told in voice, come alive. In those nightly readings I saw that stories pass on archetypal dramas of cause and effect, making values an integral part of our emotional and imaginative thinking. I saw, too, that by getting us to use our minds, indeed, by forcing us to provide our own unique images for each detail, character, and event, they re-establish our faith in the creative power of our own imaginations and in the power of wish and dream to guide our lives. I experienced how stories, too, help us stay in touch with the specifics of our own memories and simultaneously discover the universal patterns that run through each and every life.”

http://www.rafemartin.com/
 

Click on the picture above or here to see a clip of Rafe reading from his book
"The Monkey Bridge"

Jorge Arenivar

  Jorge, also known as Redtail Hawk, is a core energetic therapist, teacher and ceremonial leader. He has taught Native American Indian spirituality for over 20 years. A native of Mexico, he is a sundancer and pipecarrier in the Lakota tradition.

    Jorge's mission is based on Mitakuye Oyason, meaning harmony with all my relations. He works to realize his vision to bring Light in this world, helping people in their work by lifting their consciousness and inner awareness, by encouraging the need to stay in the supported present, and by guiding them to be in right relationships with themselves and their community.

   Jorge lives with his family in St. Louis, MO. He also travels internationally, teaching and supporting students of all ages in their quest to transform their lives.  Jorge can be found at the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center several times a year guiding the Inipi Stone People’s Lodge Ceremonies, as well as teaching Native American Frame Drum making workshops.

Medard Gabel

   Medard has conducted workshops, consulted and given lectures for over 400 corporations, colleges, universities, high schools and organizations throughout the world. He is the former executive director of the World Game Institute, an UN-affiliated NGO that he founded with Buckminster Fuller. There he developed and delivered the “World Game” and numerous other global and local simulations for clients around the world. He has authored five books on the global energy situation, the global food situation, the U.S. food system, and multinational corporations, as well as developed software and Internet activities such as NetWorld Game - an online global simulation that places players in charge of the global economy. He has also developed curriculum and lesson plans for teaching about global issues, social science, environmental science, problem solving, critical thinking, and other subjects, as well as developed numerous simulations for educational and business uses.

   Some of his published work includes What The World Wants, Worldometers, The World Fact Game, and the Global Issues Primer. He is also co-founder and consultant to o.s.Earth, a company dedicated to providing global and regional simulations to education and corporate clients around the world.

http://www.bigpicturesmallworld.com/