Board Members
Jack Beckman
Jack's thirty years of school experience include serving as a teacher,
Principal, school-starter, and professor of education, and have encompassed
master's degrees in both Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Research,
and a Ph.D. in Teacher Education from the University of Cambridge. Charlotte
Mason's model of teacher training drew him to the UK to complete his dissertation
on that topic. In collecting data, Jack spent a full year driving from the
South Downs to the Lake District of England interviewing Charlotte Mason-trained
teachers ranging in age from 101 to 78 -- listening to their stories of life
in college and in the classroom. At present, he is Associate Professor of Education
at Covenant College. Jack and his wife Barbara have two lovely daughters, Kara
and Anneliese.
Amber Benton
Through working with the ChildLightUSA board Amber has grown in her knowledge
and understanding of Ms. Mason's ideas, but most of all she has been
blessed, strengthened and encouraged to continue the course set before her. She
receives support for the home education of her four boys from the Charlotte,
NC homeschool group CMeLearn. Amber has a passion for reading, and loves
pattern wherever it may be found – math, nature and all things fiber
related. She and her husband David take their boys Jonathan, Jesse, James,
and this year – Joseph - as often as possible to the mountains where
they grew up.
Lisa Cadora
Ms. Cadora has studied Mason since providentially hearing of her from Ranald
and Susan Macaulay at a Rochester, MN L'Abri Conference in the summer
of 1982, while an undergraduate education major at Covenant College. She
found a few of Mason's volumes in the college library upon returning
to school that fall, and was entirely swept up in what she recognised as a
much needed antidote to the decidedly mechanistic approach to teaching prevalent
in most teacher education programs and even Christian education practice in
those days. She was blessed to find a school some years later that employed
Mason's methods and has enjoyed a career of teaching, learning and sharing
her ideas and practice in her own school and with others who endeavor to bring
a “sane” education that honors learning in all of its complexity
to children and families in diverse settings.