Teach and Seek Justice and Equity

Our recent marketing campaign has featured the values we believe our Montessori Community embrace and foster in a Montessori classroom and or environment. As an AMI training center we too embrace these values and seek ways to model and incorporate each into our trainings and collective work.

Over the past two years the MTCNE staff has been examining the “Seeks and Teach Justice and Equity” value within our organization and trainings. Our staff has done much self and organizational reflection around Anti-Bias Anti-Racism (ABAR) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). We have had many field consulting experts work with MTCNE on basic foundational concepts and information, facilitated book studies, workshop activities and gathering of resources on such topics as racism, courageous conversations, diversity perceptions, culturally relative pedagogy, trauma sensitive instruction, second language learners, and more.

The MTCNE staff has developed a framework using the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) and the Social Justice Standards (Teaching Tolerance, 2016) as a foundation to include topics such as ABAR, cultural diversity, trauma, neuro-diverse learners and second language acquisition to be integrated and explicitly included in our AMI diploma courses. This year we are exploring ways to adjust our own lenses, how best to include, time needed to address and best resources to incorporate these topics within the course delivery. We understand there is much work to still be done but it has been a thought provoking and thoughtful process at MTCNE.

One of several MTCNE action steps identified in our plans is to focus on one particular topic each year related to the “Rights of the Child”.  As the safety, health, education and the well-being of children is prominent throughout the Convention, MTCNE has decided to dedicate each year to a new topic of concern in relationship to these rights. In 2023 MTCNE has chosen “Gun Violence and Children” as a theme for discussion, information gathering, political awareness and community action.

Over the next several months we will provide further information regarding this topic and activities hosted by MTCNE to address this major safety issue facing our American children. We invite you to join us as we examine our roles to protect the children we serve.