Montessorians live and breathe the emergent significance of the prepared environment.
Spaces are arranged with intention. Beauty, relationship, independence, movement, and concentration are central considerations. Conditions are created in which something may manifest that cannot simply be taught into existence.
I’ve been thinking about that idea in relation to adults, and to TIES.
What might a prepared environment for adult transformation actually feel like from the inside?
TIES graduate, faculty member, and dear friend Tammy Oesting recently explored that question in her Substack, The Coherence Letters. Reflecting on her own experience in the program, she wrote:
“My cohort with my graduate program, The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES), taught me what it feels like to be inside a syntropic community as a learner—to be seen, drawn forward, and changed by a field of shared attention. But I had spent decades building such fields myself without fully naming them, because the Montessori classroom, at its best, is precisely this: a prepared environment engineered to generate collective coherence.”
I keep returning to the circularity of that realization.
Tammy had spent decades creating environments for children, only to find herself in a learning environment that asked something of her as an adult. The books were part of it, certainly, but so were the questions, the dialogue, the faculty, the cohort, and the strange alchemy that can happen when people are invited into sustained inquiry together.
No single element creates the experience on its own. The relationships among them do.
That idea feels very close to the heart of TIES, and to the work Philip Snow Gang has been exploring for decades: What happens when the developmental respect at the center of Montessori is extended to the adult learner as well?
Tammy entered TIES after many years as an educator and still found herself being drawn forward, re-seeing familiar ideas, and discovering new edges of her own becoming. I find that deeply moving, perhaps because it suggests something larger about education itself: that none of us is ever really finished, and that the right environment can continue to call forth capacities we have not yet fully met.
Tammy’s words always move me to awe. This week is no exception. Check out “Syntropic Communities,” her latest essay in The Coherence Letters, where she explores the intersection of education, systems thinking, and our place within this magnificent universe.