Coming up in June is a unique conference opportunity- the first ever Black Montessori Conference will take place June 20th-22nd at Howard University in Washington, DC. This episode of Montessori in Action Podcast features the organizers of the conference: Meisha Perrin and Dr. Ayize Sabater. They share the inspirations and aspirations for the event.

Have you ever wished you had superpowers? In this next episode, meet four people with superpowers who are starting two public Montessori schools- one in Columbus, Ohio and one in Oklahoma City. These two couples envisioned tuition-free Montessori programs to serve their communities and they are bringing them into being! Both schools will open their doors this August. Rachelle and Josh Smith will be opening the school in Columbus, and Rufus and Summer Howard will be opening the school in Oklahoma City. Join us to hear about their visions and journeys.

This episode is a conversation with Dr. Kathy Escamilla, who shares her extraordinary contribution to Bilingual education in the United States. She takes us through her fifty-year career in the field and helps us to understand the developments in Bilingual education that have happened across that time. As a former president of the National Association for Bilingual Education, co-editor of the Bilingual Research Journal, and chairperson of the Bilingual SIG for the American Education Research Association, Dr. Escamilla has a unique perspective on the maturation of Bilingual education in American schools across the country.

Join guest-host Maati Wafford with Dr. Juanita Imelda Johnson, a long time teacher at Dater Montessori School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Kristen Smiterman-Voltaire, a parent at Dater, as they discuss their experiences with Equity Impact Circles.

Our episode this month looks at how current neuroscience supports the work we do in Montessori classrooms. Our guest, Veronica Burbano, an experienced Montessori teacher, shares the research she has uncovered that explains why staying true to the pedagogy matters.

This episode is a conversation with some adults who attended Montessori schools as children. They came together to talk about their experiences in their Montessori classrooms, transitioning from Montessori and looking back now on how their early education has affected who they are today. Please join me in welcoming Janyah Bradley and A’Kala Chaires.

Season 5, episode 5 is a conversation with Dr. LaNail R. Plummer, the founder of Onyx Therapy Group a Black, Woman, and Veteran-owned business, dedicated to addressing mental health issues and disparities in communities, organizations, federal government, and individuals in need. We talked about supporting Key children in classrooms and the use of Observation, relationship building and attuning to our own biases and activators. Now more than ever our Key children need us to understand behavior is communication and Dr. Plummer shared some insights on how to do this.

For more than 15 years, Lucy Recio has worked at the intersection of communications, strategy, and organizing. She builds campaigns, programs, and systems in service to community led movements that advance justice and our collective liberation. Anchored by reciprocal, transformative relationships, her work endeavors to inform policy and legislation, enact systems change, shift power structures, and shape public understanding and perception around issues impacting young children, women, and BIPOC communities.

Street Data: A Next Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and Social Transformation invites readers to rethink this era of high stakes testing and engage in new ways of ensuring growth in school for all learners. Co-author, Dr. Jamila Dugan joins Montessori in Action to talk about equity traps & tropes, street data, and how it can be used to shift the focus in schools. 

“We don’t need improvement. We need an approach that fundamentally and radically transforms the experiences of children and families at the margins. This is the purpose of centering street data in the process of transformation.”

Our conversation this month is with Meisha Perrin, the new Executive Director of the Black Montessori Education Fund, a non-profit project founded to increase access and support diversity and inclusion in Montessori education by investing in Black educators, children, administrators, and researchers in the US and globally.