ABOUT ME
Blake Leibowitz has been seriously into education and learning since Kinder-garden. Since then, her studies have become ever more rigorous as she has deepened into the world with an academic mind. She dedicates herself to philosophy and informs herself with a multi-cultural pedagogy that seeks inclusivity and aims for authenticity. This authenticity comes from transparency with her interests and a genuine seeking of students' thoughts, ideas, questions, and interests.
Blake currently works teaching High School English exploring books such as Dear America, Purple Hibiscus, Antigone, Bless Me, Ultima, and The House on Mango Street to teaching units on Feminism and the Impact of Tech in student lives. She takes great honor and joy working as a teacher with all of her students—the ones who are excited to learn just as she is, and maybe, even more, the students who don't know yet how engaging learning can be. In her own life, this practice of learning has proven to be a lifeline that has given her an abundance of experience and breadth of knowledge that she never knew was even possible.
Blake holds a BA in Philosophy from The New School Eugene Lang and an MA in Philosophy and Religion from The California Institute of Integral Studies with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. She is also a certified yoga instructor and a daily mover, breather, and stillness maker. When she is not rambling about herself in the third person, you can find her writing fiction, standing on her hands, traveling, or playing with her baby boy and doggo.
EDUCATION
Sonoma State University | Single Subject Teaching Credential — Seconday English Language Arts
This credential program has the vision to advance social justice in schools and communities through excellence in education and, in doing so, aims to provide transformative educational experiences.
California Institute of Integral Studies | MA — Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness
This program aims to shape the leadership necessary for profound, progressive transformation of social institutions and individual consciousness.
Inspired by Alfred North Whitehead's view that the function of the university is to enable the future to appear first in conceptual thought, our faculty and graduate students hold in mind three fundamental goals:
To open our consciousness, through learning and imagination, to those creative and evolutionary energies suffusing the earth, the universe, and the deep psyche, so that we are able to participate fully in the regeneration of human communities and their enveloping life systems.
To analyze the current devastation of planetary life and to strive to liberate ourselves and our communities from the underlying causes of alienation, consumerism, militarism, androcentrism, racism, and unsustainable modes of life.
To draw from the deep wells of philosophical and religious wisdom together with other scholarly and scientific insights in order to bring forth a profound vision of a vibrant planetary era.
The New School | BA — Philosophy
The courses in Philosophy combine in-depth intellectual analyses of influential philosophers with a robust and comprehensive survey of essential ideas. Pairing an understanding of both thinker and thought creates a context in which to understand underlying concepts and examine more significant intellectual implications. The focus of study in the Department of Philosophy is the history of Western philosophical thought and the European philosophical tradition, particularly contemporary Continental philosophy.
Santa Rosa Junior College | AA — World Humanities
This degree explores the arts, ideas, values and cultural expressions of the world's peoples as a foundation for lifelong learning or as an introduction to the related fields of Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies, Art History, Music Appreciation, Theatre Arts, Philosophy, English Literature, Modern and Classical Languages, or Religious Studies.