Interview: Jen Karsten

Jennifer Karsten, Pendle Hill’s new Director of Education and Dean of Students, started work in September 2010 after serving Philadelphia Yearly Meeting for two years as Director of Education. She holds a Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, which is where she met her Canadian husband Michael Gagné. They live with their two-year-old daughter, Aden, in a home on Pendle Hill’s campus. Jen talked with Shirley Dodson about her vision for Pendle Hill and how it grows from a range of experience, including attending Buckingham Friends School, traveling in India and Mexico, working with Outward Bound in the Pacific Northwest, and more.

Jen, how were you influenced by growing up in a Quaker family and attending Quaker schools?

JK During my early childhood, my mother, brother, and I were members of Doylestown Friends Meeting in Bucks County (PA). From kindergarten through 5th grade I attended Buckingham Friends School, and I also would sometimes visit Moorestown Friends School where my grandfather, Herm Magee, had a 40-year career. I still feel a loving connection to both of those schools. I didn’t attend Friends schools after 5th grade; I entered public schools at that time. Though the switch was a hard one at the time, I have become grateful for it in the long run. That is, as a person very interested in education, I’m glad to have been exposed to more than one type of experience. Friends schools provide such a wonderful learning environment and I’m so appreciative to have been a student at BFS; it has also been helpful to have been a student in the public system to which I now give attention as a volunteer. I dream of the day when the type of Friends schooling experience that I enjoyed is the baseline of quality for all school districts.

Though it’s hard for me to know exactly how my childhood Quaker experiences influenced me, I believe they influenced me a good deal. I suppose that my values were nurtured at meeting, school, and (primarily) at home. My mother gave me a helpful example of someone who balanced worship with activism and simplicity with art and fun and she’s influenced me to volunteer regularly and support groups that can make structural change. I am sure that it’s mostly due to her influence that I've volunteered for the American Friends Service Committee, been an employee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and was very drawn to work at Pendle Hill.

Describe a "formative experience" that helped shape the direction of your life and work.

JK In the 1980s and 90s I travelled often and visited some countries where I saw the face of poverty for the first time. Some of the poorer districts I visited in India and Mexico, for example, were striking lessons to me in global disparity. At one point I met a child who had been intentionally disfigured by his parents in order to make him a more effective beggar. His arm had been broken so that he might get more money to help feed his family. I know that’s a terrible image to introduce here, but I couldn’t forget that day. It prompted me to learn more about how we might move toward a world that uses and shares its resources better, and to figure out my role in that transition to a different world.

Jen, you bring a rich, diverse educational background and career to Pendle Hill. What do you see as the highlights of your education and work experience to date?

JK I guess my career really began when I worked with Outward Bound in the Pacific Northwest 18 years ago. I became inspired to work in, and on behalf of, the wild. Later I became interested in Education as a field and, when I searched for the places where Environmental Study and Education intersect, I found ways that Education can play a role in Environmental Justice and Social Justice work and that became a real passion. In recent years, my work (and volunteer life) have pretty much centered on those things. I think that my highest aspirations now are to contribute as strongly as I can to the movement toward a world that is in “right-relationship.” I’m grateful for the role models who have helped me see what that kind of life can look like.

Who are some of your mentors and role models and how have they influenced you?

JK One role model was my grandmother Lydia. She was gracious, patient, frugal, hard-working and generous; I spent summers working as a chambermaid at her guest house in Cape May and I learned a lot from her about interacting with people. Another is Irene McHenry, executive director of Friends Council on Education, who models being present and staying attuned and open, as a leader and as a Friend. My most frequent role model is my husband, Michael Gagné . He helps me stay true to myself because he knows me so well, and he’s a great sounding board; he also demonstrates living a life committed to social change and that’s been an important example for me as I seek to live out my own values.

What was your first experience of Pendle Hill?

JK I had walked on the campus previously, but my first real Pendle Hill experience was with the Friends Council on Education for an “Educators New to Quakerism” workshop a few years ago. I remember feeling pampered by the array of teas and the homemade brownies. I experienced how Pendle Hill seeks to nourish people holistically so that they’re receptive to the learning that happens here. I also recall the beauty of the Conlon room, the big meeting room in Brinton House.

What work experiences have stood out for you as most meaningful?

JK I’ve been lucky to have frequent chances to work outdoors. At Awbury Arboretum in Germantown (PA), I served as education director with responsibility for training teachers and forming and strengthening programs and partnerships. I especially loved the opportunities I had to teach and to make nature accessible to hundreds (sometimes thousands) of Philadelphians each year. I recall little hands carefully holding a salamander for the first time, and teachers coming there to learn creative ways of educating their students about environmental systems at their urban schools. When we would run professional development sessions at local schools, many teachers brought creativity to overcome lack of field-trip funding – for example one woman showed her students how to do water studies on rainy days by testing the puddle water that would collect on their playgrounds, and showed the other teachers how to do the same. Those moments stand out.

While I worked there, I reached out to other Education Directors at local green-space sites. I was hoping that we might meet to discuss topics of shared concern: safety, audience numbers, transportation, state curricular standards, etc. Before contacting them, I was concerned that they would not be receptive to the idea of collaboration – that they might think that, as “competitors,” we should not share openly with one another. What happened, however, was that the first person I approached was immediately enthusiastic and when we invited others, they all gladly showed up. We ended up meeting regularly – rotating our meetings between each other’s sites. It was hugely validating for the five of us to hear that we were all facing similar challenges and that it felt wise and easy to share our solutions. We also celebrated the ways that we were on mission, the ways in which we were sharing knowledge about nature with the city community.

How have you learned from mistakes, or from times when things did not go as you had hoped?

JK I make dozens of mistakes each week, most of which I’m able to clean up quickly and move past. This mistake-making has strengthened me because I have learned about consequences and how survivable most of them are. One example: as a younger practitioner, it was easy for me to speak from youthful “clarity,” full of answers. Sometimes my certainty wasn’t authentic – just me trying to prove myself or be recognized as having something to offer – I thought I had to have answers. Now I’ve grown to be more comfortable asking questions and accepting a lack of clarity during the large part of discernment. It feels a lot better this way; I get to invite and hear a range of perspectives and the effort for me, then, simply becomes keeping my mind and heart truly receptive to those views.

What are the “needs” that you perceive in the Religious Society of Friends today? How do you see Pendle Hill addressing those needs over the next few years?

JK My personal “two cents” is that one thing we need to figure out is how to attract more people of color to our monthly and yearly meetings and to leadership positions in Friends’ institutions. What do we need to change? I think that when we no longer have a predominant “type,” we will have really lived into our testimonies.

While we’re working on that big question, I also see a concurrent need that today’s Friends do as we've done on occasion in our history and deliver an improbably high-volume message (given our relative numbers worldwide) with regard to sustainability. I would love for us to lead by example and movement building, so that we can be the change and accelerate the positive changes. In many ways the world that I see is on the brink and I would like to see Friends be known models of peace, sanity, sustainability, for the world to learn from or join with. Many Friends are already very committed to this and I think that Pendle Hill can be a place that multiplies those voices and hosts the ongoing dialogue and experimentation and spiritual wrestling that will be part of getting us there.

Jen, what is your vision for Pendle Hill?

JK My vision? Well, I've been here a month, so please take this with a grain of salt! That said, my vision is of a place that is truly alive as an experimental laboratory. That is, a place that, while grounded in mindful, spiritual stillness, bustles with people of all ages and backgrounds seeking to try out ways of building bridges between the now (current state of the world) and the beloved community of the future. I hope that in this laboratory we will be joined by all kinds of constituencies in education programs that challenge us – and then have mechanisms for taking our learning to all the fellow seekers around the world.

What changes do you hope to see at Pendle Hill?

JK I’d like to see us continue with what is wonderful about Pendle Hill, and then add in some of the following, if Friends agree that they flow naturally from our mission and vision: bold experimentation (programming that pushes us to expand our comfort zones and makes this a safe place to invite challenging ideas and discourse); greater diversity (in our staff, visitors, and presenters); sustainability (There are many people here who have been invested in this for a very long time, so I’ll just lend my voice to say that I hope our garden and growing systems will expand to make us ever more self-reliant. I'd love to see us get as "off grid" as possible – using our ingenuity and creativity to reduce our overall eco-footprint to a new low in ways that other sites can replicate).

What do you hope will stay the same?

JK Worship. Green space. The spirit of love, care, and giving that permeates the place. The delicious food that is lovingly prepared from our garden. The appreciation and welcoming of seekers across lines of culture, class, religion, and language. The love of learning and willingness to transform. And I hope my favorite tree, the Atlas Blue cedar, will still be here.