Lauren Poirier Elliott (MA.Ed) is the director and teacher at The Mountain’s Edge. She has been an educator, caregiver, co-conspirator, and playmate of young children for over 20 years. She has a graduate degree in early childhood education and directed her own early learning program in New Orleans before moving to the mountain’s edge in 2021. She has taught in Montessori and Reggio-inspired preschools (most recently at Smith College’s preschool, Fort Hill, in Northampton), and worked for five years assessing teachers in publicly-funded preschools for the State of Louisiana. Her graduate thesis work was titled, “Existing with Dragons: Imagination at the Heart of Liberation and Education”. She is a certified Nature-Based Teacher through Association for Nature-Based Education (ANBE).
Her practice is guided by a deep-rooted belief in the intelligence of each child – socially, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually – no matter the external circumstances they’ve been given, as well as a belief in the necessity and power of imagination, story, and the natural world in young children’s learning.
She is both a teacher and a student of young children, and is committed to self-reflection and on-going study. As a white teacher in a white supremacist society, she seeks to create learning environments where all children see themselves and their families reflected and celebrated (in the stories, books, play themes, songs, and people), and where children can have windows into lives different from their own. She is also aware that very young children are experiencing and observing the unjust norms of our society and she is learning to create age-appropriate space for children to reflect on what they are experiencing. She welcomes ideas, dialogue, and resources from families and educators who are thinking about this as well.
While she has always loved being among trees and animals, more recently becoming a mother and moving to the mountain’s edge has invited her into a deeper relationship with the more-than-human world. In this time of myriad crises, she worries about the future for her daughter and all children, and sees relationship with nature as one (among many) possible responses to these times. She wants children to have the opportunity to grow up in kinship with the land, knowing how to be nourished by the natural world, and knowing how to care for it as one cares for family.
Lauren practices meditation in daily life and has spent over two years in silent meditation retreats in the Insight Buddhist tradition. Since 2017, she has practiced a Soulmaking Dharma, a new flowering of the dharma that seeks to respond to modern times through restoring and deepening our senses of sacredness in the world. Her life, her work, and perspectives have especially been shaped by this practice.
The Mountain's Edge: An Education for these Times 