Rewilding Montessori
PMAI’s Season 5 final podcast features a conversation about rewilding Montessori. Host Elizabeth Slade, joined by two deep thinkers —Lucy Recio and Frank George—share their ideas about the concept of rewilding and the mechanisms for making sense of our complex world.
Like the children who move through our prepared environment, selecting work that aligns with their developmental needs, adults must also learn to choose work from a balanced perspective. Lucy Recio, network weaver, strategist, resource mobilizer, and co-founder and principal consultant of Third Bloom Consulting, also felt deep resonance with the framework, sharing how it aligns beautifully with professional learning and leadership. Lucy posed several thought-provoking questions about how we create vehicles to be in community with each other and commit to an embodied leadership practice that centers on joy, reclamation, and resilience.
But what does this mean in practice?
The Four Circles of Our Being
Frank George, a dedicated Montessori advocate and world-builder, is developing the Four Circles of Harmony, a framework described as a critical approach to adult education and preparation.
George describes the Four Circles of Harmony as a framework that allows us to find a sense of direction and challenges the notion that spiritual preparation for adults is a solitary event. In considering what seems to be a crisis of community within Montessori, this way of thinking leads to unhealthy ideas of isolation and hyper-independence.
The framework highlights areas where our holistic interconnected work can happen. Each is an area where work can emerge.
The inner community speaks to the various voices within us. Through the lens of Internal Family Systems, we can begin to recognize different aspects of our identities, both complementary and contradictory, as valid parts of our inner landscape. The work is not to silence these voices but to find harmony among them.
The intimate community—our family, close friends, and colleagues—provides the mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly. It's in the quiet conversations with fellow educators and relationships that challenge us to remain authentic, to admit when we don't have more questions than answers, and to sit with uncertainty.
The public community encompasses our villages and towns, as well as the broader educational landscape in which we operate. We practice being in relationships and consider various circles of viewpoints that may challenge our assumptions.
The global community may seem abstract, yet with technology, we have access to communities far and wide; these connections pulse through every interaction. When we honor our global complexities, we are participating in something much larger than ourselves.
This work is indeed much larger than any one person or organization.
Host Elizabeth Slade's question, "What do we armour against? What keeps us from our authenticity?" Challenged listeners to examine our defensive postures.
Lucy Recio’s deep wisdom on leadership, embodiment, and community helped listeners put the framework and Slade’s question into context. One may find that such questions result in a familiar tightening in the chest. When questioned about our particular teaching, learning, and leadership approach, we may even retreat into professional jargon as a response to uncertainty.
Maintaining a facade of having it all together can lead us to exhaustion.
This potent conversation and call-in encourages listeners to get curious about rewilding as a pathway to restoring our internal systems. From this place, we are better equipped to face the residue we bring from past experiences and open ourselves up to the healing that comes from our presence in immediate moments with children, families, and colleagues.
Moving Beyond Individual Transformation
As we face a systemic crisis of community, we can no longer depend on solitary contemplation or individual professional development. We must be brave enough to grapple with problems and generate ideas as a collective. Adult preparation must build upon and deepen our resilience, moving from what allows us to withstand harm to what supports the reclamation of our most authentic selves and our communities.
Rewilding Montessori prompts us to seek deeper questions and answers about how we collectively withstand and reclaim the complexities of the critical work we’ve all committed ourselves to.
Reflection Questions:
Below are a few questions that are circling in my mind and heart after pondering this framework and conversation. I hope these questions will encourage listeners to move beyond surface-level approaches to practice toward the kind of deep, collective work that honors both individual growth and community transformation. Consider engaging with these questions in community rather than in isolation, embodying the very principles they explore.
What do you/we armor against? What keeps us from our authenticity? How would you answer this with your leadership or teaching practice front of mind?
What would embodied leadership look like in your context—leadership that centers joy, reclamation, and resilience rather than performance and perfection?
When was the last time you admitted to a colleague that you had more questions than answers about your practice? What made that conversation possible or difficult?
How might you create vehicles for genuine community rather than professional networking or compliance-based collaboration?
How might your Montessori community contribute to addressing broader social challenges in your area rather than operating as an isolated educational island?
How might climate change, technology, social justice movements, or global migration patterns be calling for evolution in Montessori practice?