East Bay Montessori is proud to announce that our very own Head of School, Alissa Stolz, M.Ed., has been selected to present at the 29th International Montessori Congress in Bangkok, Thailand, on August 4, 2023. Her talk, given with Jeff Hester (a longtime friend and former Board committee member of the school) will focus on the intersection of modern neuroscientific discovery and Montessori classroom practices that have been in place since 1907. They will show how the child’s sensorial construction and perception of the self will continue to be supported by Montessori education even as the world morphs at high speed and becomes ever-more multicultural and interconnected.

In their own words:

Locked inside the dark, quiet interior of a skull, our brains have no direct access to the world. The brain must infer what is going on outside the body, then test those inferences – those predictive models – using electrochemical signals from the senses. Quoting Montessori, “The senses, being explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge.”

Just as we construct our unique conscious experience of the world, we construct the perception we call “the self.” Crucially, we can only construct conscious worlds from the ideas and active experiences that we have had. That flows from the experiential, sensorial, social approach at the core of Montessori education. 

This will be her second talk selected by the IMC; previously, Stolz presented on sensory input at the International Montessori Congress in 2017, in Prague, Czech Republic. 

We wish to congratulate Alissa on this wonderful achievement, and can’t wait to share more as the Congress unfolds.