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Our Educational Philosophy:Our ideas stem from a careful balance between our own professional and observational experience and a broad range of research. We strongly believe in a cross-disciplinary approach to education, following academic discourses in fields as varied as developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, brain science, philosophy of mind, psychoanalytic theory and practice, cultural anthropology, psychological anthropology, linguistics, and play theory. Our research into child development is informed by researchers and theorists including Jean Piaget, Lev Vygostky, Barbara Rogoff, Patricia Arlin, Andy Meltzoff, Daniel Stern, and Erik Erikson. We draw from the work of John Medina, among others, to inform us how brain science connects to education. We have utilized Donald Winnicott's conception of a "holding environment" to provide boundaries that help a student contain urges to resist or act out against our help specifically or the educational process in general, and we have used his notion of a "good enough mother" to measure the degree to which we must be adaptive to our students' needs. Winnicott, along with Albert Solnit, Johan Huizinga and a whole genre of Russian Formalists, have influenced our conception of play theory. Gyorgy Gergely's essay on the "pedagogical stance" has been instrumental in how we assess our students' readiness to learn, and Labov's work in the 70's helps us consider how to enter dialogue with our students on their terms. A student not ready to learn may be in need of "emotion coaching," which is informed by John Gottman's research and work. Whether emotion coaching or formally educating in the subject matters of academia, we practice what Patricia Arlin termed "cognitive level matching," meeting students where they are developmentally, guiding them through what Lev Vygotsky called their "zone of proximal development." |