Marna Hauk, PhD

Marna Hauk, PhD, directs programs and innovates learning and scholarship in regenerative futures, climate justice education, ecological systems, and leadership and imagination. Dr. Hauk serves as founding faculty of the doctoral program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College and New Earth Institute.

Dr. Hauk graduated with honors from Prescott College with a PhD in Education, with a focus on Sustainability Education. Her doctoral research leveraged biomimicry and regenerative sustainabilities while interviewing founders of earth wisdom schools to design educational systems for innovation and change.  She graduated with a Masters in Culture and Spirituality from the Holy Names University Sophia Program and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College with a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature, with thesis work involving a cross-cultural study of nature immersion and presence.

Dr. Hauk catalyzes graduate programs that are experientially immersive, creatively integrative, intellectually challenging, diversity-inclusive, research- and praxis-extensive, and skills-building for the Great Turning. She is a member of the Work That Reconnects Network and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sustainability Education and Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal.

A maverick in residential and community-based graduate program innovation, Dr. Hauk has created online, hybrid, and experiential curricula in educational transformation, ecopreneurship, regenerative leadership, and advanced research methods. She has designed and delivered eighty-five graduate courses in sustainability education, leadership, educational systems transformation, regenerative design, collaborative inquiry, research methods, and ecofeminism. Dr. Hauk was awarded a multi-year fellowship from the North American Association for Environmental Education and the EPA in Community Climate Change for her curriculum leveraging social incubators and regenerative creativity for project-based community climate change visionary activists. Dr. Hauk also received a recent grant and national publication for her curriculum and research in contemplative climate justice leadership from Curriculum for the Bioregion. Her research interviewing innovative wisdom school founders inspired by queer ecologies merited special selection at the Research Symposium of the NAAEE. Her scholarship on queer, land-based regenerative educational leadership has been featured in multiple chapters and books. 

Dr. Hauk co-edited two recent books: a practitioner volume on Community Climate Change Education: A Mosaic of Approaches (NAAEE & Cornell, 2017) as well as a scholarly compendium, Vibrant Voices: Women, Myth, and the Arts (Women and Myth, 2018), which was named the top 100 notable books in the field. A published poet and scholar with 130+ refereed publications and presentations, Dr. Hauk’s recent work has appeared in the Journal of Sustainability Education, the Australian Journal of Environmental Education, the International Environmental Review, Artizein, On Sustainability, Bumerang, Cornell Press, and Ecopsychology. She has presented internationally through peer-review selection, including at the The American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the North American Association of Environmental Education, the International Symposium of Poetic Inquiry, the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, and the Women’s Studies Association. 

Dr. Hauk flourishes near Hood River, Oregon, on the traditional lands of the Chinookan and Wasco Nations, in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion, creating permaculture and regeneratively-designed teaching and learning gardens and food forests for Gaian flourishing.