In today’s episode, I’ll be speaking with Nicole Marie, the pedagogista at Evergreen Community School, a progressive social constructivist preschool in Santa Monica that’s been educating children, teachers, and conducting teacher research for over forty years.

She was a founding member and a mentor teacher for the PilaGlobal, which has been a hub for discourse in early childhood, and currently builds and supports educational spaces for young children displaced by poverty world wide.

An educator and writer, she was the lead writer for Patagonia’s award nominated book Family Business: Innovative On- Site Child Care Since 1983. Her work training and consulting with schools has taken her into educational spaces all over the country and world. A long time Buddhist meditator and practitioner of Soulmaking Dharma, there is a strong connection between her understandings of human consciousness and imagination and what it means to serve young children and their families.

In 2022, Nicole and Evergreen Community School will be publishing “The Pencil is Me: a Collection of Poetry by Young Children,” which is a selection of poems collected from over a decade’s poetry written by two to five-year-olds.

We talk about the following and more:

✅ Why understanding children is so important? And how have we misunderstood them?

✅ How the view people have of children and childhood impact and structure children's live

✅ Where most people get stuck or misunderstand young children

✅ What the value of children and childhoodmeans in the wider culture

✅What children have to teach us about the role of imagination in a well lived life

✅ What happens to schools and our perspective on what education is, when we shift the question from what makes a "good education" to what do young people need to learn live a fulfilled human life?

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