A transformative teacher, director, mentor, friend, Carol Stoneburner died peacefully between Christmas and New Years in Asheville, North Carolina. Throughout the two-week process she was companioned by John, her husband she married in 1959, their son, Stephen and his wife Jessa, longtime friends, and former students and colleagues.
 
As founder and Coordinator of Women’s Studies and Director of Faculty Development at Guilford College, she was adventurous, boldly inquiring, inclusive, enticing. She drew a wide range of faculty into reading groups on gender issues and imaginative educational initiatives. In 1979, she directed a major symposium “American Quaker Women as Shapers of Human Space.” She co-edited with John Stoneburner a collection of scholarly papers, The Influence of Quaker Women on American History, published by Edwin Mellen Press in Studies in Women and Religion. She had an organizational ability to open up multiple dimensions of an issue and engage and welcome people’s different professional and personal styles and perspectives of knowing. In programming she was always a big picture strategic thinker while attentive to day to day details to make things happen. With her warmth and wry sense of humor, she overcame many obstacles, bringing visionary innovations into the realm of the possible. 
 
Working with her two faculty committees for Women Studies and Faculty Development, her enthusiasm was contagious and her collaborative leadership effective as they dispersed Kenan funds for faculty development and advocated for interdisciplinary programs, team-teaching, and women’s studies’ curricular changes, in individual courses, a concentration, and eventually a major. 
 
She and John were a teaching partnership who engendered and supported partnerships in teaching among faculty, especially through the enhancement of interdisciplinary courses and team-teaching. They lured colleagues to break out of their disciplinary restrictions, to engage the common human dimension in disciplinary problems, to grow by listening to other aspects seen from different perspectives, and to weave them into more complex, never completed, understandings. Not only learning but acting: bringing issues of justice and social change into the classroom in order to be carried into their lives.

She made life-changing impacts on generations of students. Team-teaching “Processes in Education,” “Women in Religion,” “Contemporary Religious Life Styles,” “Feminist Theology,” and “Women, Body, Voice,” she and John enabled women and men to find their voice, to face and heal from trauma, to catch a vision of change — individual and societal — worth pursuing. Carol empowered classes to teach each other, as she provided materials and structure in a human space where students learned to lead and listen each other into truth. She was herself a consummate listener and mentor, embodying principles of community leadership, sharing her wisdom while nurturing individual diversity and creativity.
  
At their retirement from Guilford College in 2006, the celebration for Carol and John combined academic and career presentations by many of their students with a “homecoming” reunion where hundreds of colleagues and alums from the l970s through the turn of the century reconnected joyfully throughout the weekend. After living for several years in Glencoe, a revivified mill village near Burlington, she and John moved to Asheville to be close to Stephen and Jessa. Carol continued to accompany, support and lovingly guide former and new students and colleagues in their life’s endeavors with her faithfulness to creating and nurturing connections. She led a collaborative effort to celebrate 40 years of Women’s Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Guilford in 2015 and created a digital portfolio of reflections. This site is kept live and is being used in current Guilford classes. Recently, Carol was researching and writing about the generations of women in her family, in her ongoing commitment to seeing that womens’ stories are told. 

A memorial service for Carol is planned Saturday, Feb. 4, at 2 p.m. at Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church on the campus of Warren Wilson College, 101 Chapel Lane Swannanoa, N.C., 28778. A live stream of the service will be available at this link. There will be a reception following the service. Friends are invited to gather after the memorial service from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Highland Brewing Company, the 12 Old Charlotte Highway, Asheville, N.C., location. If you would like to contact John Stoneburner, please write to him at 12 Moreview Road, Asheville, N.C., 28803