Jason is a lifelong educator, adventurer, and writer whose two and a half decades as a teacher reflect Bald Mountain Meadow’s core mission of connecting people and places for a better world. His love for the natural world and for wild places; his desire to foster powerful connections between the disciplines; and his core belief that real life is the very best classroom and that kids have the ability to do good work in it now—have been the defining throughlines of his career. With his students he has stood on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro; paid homage to a dying glacier in Iceland; cooked and eaten deer heart over an open fire; walked through canyons in the footsteps of mountain lions; stood with brown bears in Alaska; steered canoes down the CT River–and so many myriad other adventures twining the head, the hands, and the heart and embodying his pedagogical lodestar: that we must know a place to love a place, and we must love a place to preserve it.
In his early days as a teacher, he taught environmental literature and writing and led learning expeditions to places like Utah, Tanzania, Iceland, and Alaska. He completed his Instructor Course from the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) in 2010 as a way to deepen his skills as an experiential educator. For the last decade and a half, he was a tenured and member of the English Department at Phillips Exeter Academy where he created and taught Literature and the Land, a field-based environmental humanities course and the Green Umbrella Learning Lab, a design thinking course in sustainability where students enacted complex sustainability projects benefitting the school and town communities. He also created and directed the Environmental Literature Institute for teachers, hosting renowned writers and thinkers like J Drew Lanham, Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Elder, Linda Hogan, Scott Russell Sanders, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Annie Merrill, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Mark Long, and Laird Christenson, all of whom continue to serve as Bald Mountain mentors today. Jason also led the Academy’s efforts to develop and implement a comprehensive Climate Action Plan.
Jason opened Bald Mountain Meadow in 2021 to meet the needs of contemporary students and teachers in a changing world, offering place-based learning expeditions and professional development opportunities modeling interdisciplinary, joy-centered education and inviting both stakeholder perspectives and opportunities for students to do real work in the world.
Jason is Bald Mountain Meadow’s Founder, core Program Director and Lead Instructor, and Publisher with Wild Dog Press. Currently, he is working on a book outlining Bald Mountain Meadow’s pedagogical approach, a resource he hopes will grow the reach of place-based education for schools and teachers around the world.
