Dr. Michaela Ensweiler is the founder of Duck on the Fox. Her work is grounded in the belief that education is most powerful when it reconnects people to land, food, their bodies, and one another.

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With an M.S.Ed from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA, Michaela’s research explores food systems, ecopedagogy, sustainability, and the social conditions that shape how people learn. Her teaching and scholarship center relational, community-rooted learning: education that links individual experience to broader ecological and social systems.

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Beyond her academic expertise, Michaela brings more than a decade of experience in nutrition, functional health, strength training, CrossFit, and powerlifting. Her studies at UCLA in nutrition, food studies, and sustainability helped her see how nourishment, movement, and ecology intersect, and how everyday practices can become acts of care, resistance, and transformation.

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Duck on the Fox weaves together these threads. It is an ecosystem where education, nourishment, movement, and sustainability support one another - creating hands-on, relational learning experiences designed to strengthen both people and the planet. Through curriculum, workshops, and community partnerships, Michaela’s work invites learners to build practices of connection and to imagine what it means to (re)wild the ways we eat, move, and learn in a changing world.

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Order her edited volume: Freire and Student Empowerment: : Freire in Focus Michaela L. Ensweiler Bloomsbury Academic - Bloomsbury

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Read other selected publications:

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Postdigital Permaculture and Ecopedagogy | SpringerLink

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Widening students’ ways of knowing global environmental issues through deepened local understandings: Childhood ecopedagogy for praxis - Mary E Short, Michaela Ensweiler, Greg William Misiaszek, 2025