I worked as a high school Latin tutor and counselor for girls in a San Francisco area detention center before discovering Montessori. After university travel in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, I earned degrees in philosophy, and world religions, at San Francisco State University.

It was reading “The Montessori Method” and seeing the positive changes in my 3-year-old daughter after she began attending a Montessori school in San Francisco, that inspired me to study Montessori: at the AMI training center in London; the birth-3 Assistants to Infancy course (Denver and Rome);  6- 12  in Washington DC). later I edited The Erdkinder Newsletter during the years before the first Montessori farm school for adolescents was created. I earned a MEd degree at Loyola University in Baltimore, and studied multiple intelligences with Dr. Howard Gardner at The Harvard Graduate School of Education.

For years I tested and selected the materials and wrote the “teaching text,” of the catalogs for the Michael Olaf Montessori Company—a project begun by our two confidant teen-age Montessori graduates. These catalogs were used world-wide as an introduction to Montessori and resulted in my being invited to speak internationally at universities and to governments. I have worked as a consultant for traditional and Montessori schools, helped to develop programs for orphanages and schools for refugees and the poor, taught “Montessori” with no special materials at a private girls’ school in Lima, Peru, and worked as an oral examiner on AMI (Association Montessori Internationale) courses.

I was introduced to TM meditation by my AMI trainer in London in 1970 and credit this daily practice with the ability to create calmly over the years. I have traveled in 70+ countries and carried out Montessori work in 30 countries on six continents. My fifteen books share my teaching experience, and what I have learned working with others. They have been translated into many languages.

When not working in the field I write and paint in our home in Trinidad, California, surrounded and inspired by giant redwood trees and the sound of the ocean waves.

Home page: www.susanart.net