Pavel Cenkl, PhD

Pavel Cenkl is the Dean of Academic Affairs at Prescott College. He has worked for more than 20 years in academic leadership at progressive independent colleges in the US and abroad. His work focuses on the intersection of transformative learning, community and ecology and on finding the tangible steps we can take together toward a more regenerative and resilient educational future. Prior to joining Prescott, Pavel was the Founder and Director of the Regenerative Learning Network; Head of Schumacher College (Devon, UK) and Dean of Sterling College in Vermont. Pavel writes and speaks widely about curriculum design and pedagogy, global learning networks, environmental humanities and philosophy and has developed programs in ecology, humanities, outdoor skills and recreation, regenerative food and farming, and more. Pavel’s books include Transformative Learning: Reflections on 30 Years of Head, Heart, and Hands at Schumacher College (with Satish Kumar, 2021); Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast (2010); and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784–1911 (2006). His current book project is titled Networked Learning: Transforming Higher Education through Distributed Learning.
 
Pavel is also a keen trail runner, cross-country, skimo and backcountry skier, mountain biker, and rock and ice climber. For the past decade, his passion for endurance running, ecological thinking, and teaching has led Pavel to share his adventures as witness to climate change and an exploration of the resilience of the human and more-than-human in the Arctic, sub-Arctic, and beyond.