By Tchera Niyego

I discovered Elements Preschool a few months ago during my extended early childhood education studies. To my delight, it is not only a place of discovery for children, but also for adults. Soon after being introduced to Elements Preschool, I started working with Kirsten Voiles, the founder and director, with whom I share a passion for education and the arts.

A significant part of the motivation in doing this interview was a desire on my part to get to know Voiles better while introducing her compassionate views to more caregivers, teachers, and parents. Voiles is resolutely dynamic, genuinely curious, straightforward, warmhearted, and playful. May all children everywhere endlessly blossom into autonomy, authenticity, and joyful expression.

Tchera Niyego: You hold a Masters in Consciousness Studies with a focus on neurophysiology of emotions and attachment. Would you please explain what that training entails?

Kirsten Voiles: When I began my research, I didn’t know exactly how to define what I was looking for, what question about consciousness I was asking. I wanted to understand what the feeling of love is in all its different expressions and how this can allow people a sense of openness, freedom, and trust. Why are we able to hear things differently when we are in the state of love for example? How do we gain greater access to that state of being in order to better understand others? And why do certain experiences of love come with states of bliss and ecstatic sensations of oneness with all of existence?

During the two years prior to beginning my master’s studies, I had experienced three massive shifts in my perceptual abilities. When I gave birth to my son naturally at home something revelatory happened to my body, and I suddenly had a lot more access to sensory and emotional information than I had had before. It seemed that many things had been stored in my body that were opened or released during the process of an unmedicated and non-medical birth experience.

Following that, I spent two years in deep philosophical conversations with my brother as he was dying. I started recognizing my emotions and realizing that the process of blocking them had been a slow development over years. It was like returning to a way of being that I remembered but that had become foreign as I took on the many roles of adulthood while acclimating to societal expectations. There was this inner navigation that it seemed I had always sensed and depended on during dramatic life changing decisions but had become silenced or dormant during everyday life.

And then I fell in love. The dramatic changes in my sensory stimulation, grasp on reality, and personal narrative was flooring.

Alongside all of this, I was teaching preschoolers. The changes in my emotional abilities were changing the way I felt the needs of the kids, changing the way I understood their struggles, conflicts, desires, and experience of life. I began to see this dramatic difference between usual adult ways of being with children and how kids really needed their big people to show up for them. Underpinning this difference was a feeling of trust, and I wanted to understand why adults mistrust kids and how we could change this. How could it be that we could believe in wanting to be loving with our children and not actually be communicating love to them or with them?

Ultimately it all came together in the question what is love? So, I studied consciousness, as in, how do I have any awareness of myself as the experiencer? And how/why does that experience of myself change and/or stay constant? How does the knowledge of myself originate or develop? How do my feelings relate to or connect with anything “outside” of myself, say for example, my mother, my babies, the children that I teach, my wife, or the All of Everything? And how could I feel the connection to the whole of existence?

Being in an active state of love brought with it a way to trust in the validity of the children’s experiences no matter what they were doing. Connecting the dots, concepts, and experiences, was the feeling in the person who was experiencing them. So, what are feelings? How do they work? How do we come to know anything, because the feelings seem to be the place where we land when we’re “in knowing.” This all led me to the neurophysiology of emotions, and that the body maps those pathways of sensation which are formed with our early caregivers and attachment relationships. The access to specific feeling awareness is shaped by, nourished or blocked, and encouraged through regular pleasurable connective and affirming experiences, or numbed and defended against as dangerous with consistent experiences of pain, neglect, abandonment, ignoring, invalidation, or harm.

My thesis under the field of embodiment studies, is not only that the love we feel, and the ways we can feel--or more specifically allow love--is dependent on our particular bodies, but also that the cosmic, miraculous, transcendent sensations of oneness with all existence is ever present and accessible to us simply because we are bodies as part of a larger body. It is not just that we are interconnected, it is that we are cells of the whole and that under certain circumstances we can feel the larger body of which we are a part.

The most revolutionary of my findings is that we can practice and access more and more sensations of the connectedness between us. I would name this experience attunement. What I mean by it is, yes, resonance with someone or something, but more pointedly, a deliberate act of allowing the internal experience of another being to pervade your own sensory awareness. It is more than empathy. It’s not just relating with how someone else is feeling or imagining/remembering how it feels to be in someone else’s circumstance or how you’ve felt similarly. It’s allowing your body to register the body of another. From my experience, it is much easier to do this in relationship with children because they have not yet learned all these culturally dictated, weaving and complicated ways of blocking access to their feelings.

Simultaneously, young humans must attune to their caregivers’ emotions for sheer survival. We don’t interpret the information when we’re babies, or fetuses—we naturally and necessarily register and resonate the inner sensations of our caregivers’ bodies. Over time, particularly in western culture, we are taught to numb access to this information and ultimately to override it. Again, from my experience, this is what makes attunement between adults more difficult. There are a lot of layers of self-defense, blocking, and misinterpretation to wade through in order to get back to sensing our own feelings and sensing what someone else is experiencing beneath those layers of diversion.

Tchera Niyego: Please tell us also about your background of 20 years educating children. When was Elements established and how did it come about?

Kirsten Voiles: My oldest son is 21 and my younger son is 15. So, in that way I’ve been caring for and educating children for many years. Even when I was a kid, I had this understanding that there was something separating adult ways of relating to younger people. That insight has never left me and guided my relationship with my own children and later how I approached working with kids in institutional settings.

I’ve studied education and worked with kids throughout my life in many different capacities. I’ve worked with kids in theater and dance, running camp classes and choreographing for plays. I taught dance for several years and did school programs for dance as well. My first degree is in Arts and Education, and I worked in several daycares as part of my undergraduate work. I also studied education at Eastern Michigan University, where I had intended to work with older kids and did my practicum at Huron High School.

Studying education really highlighted for me the state of our cultural dissociation with learning, growing, and being young. Witnessing the way that we educate teachers to educate children, I was watching in real time what I would define as a serious crisis of humanity. Why we develop this kind of amnesia that we sink into as we grow up within this culture was later more clearly elucidated through my master’s work.

When I first started working full time as a preschool teacher, I saw this constant struggle between adults trying to meet societal expectations in opposition to really understanding and connecting with kids. There was a dramatic break between the two ways of being—one that sought specific outcomes of behavior and achievement, and the other that rested in more primal, intuitive, body awareness and sensations. For young humans, these, I would say, competing ways of being have dramatic and confusing effects on their development and ability to grow well. Along with the behavioral dictates for both children and adults, I began to get a glimpse of this entire paradigm that sees humans as inherently faulty, of needing instructions in order to not be bad, and of being wholly ignorant and incompetent. I wanted teachers and parents to think about how in addition to a general condescension toward children in this culture, the reliance on punishment as a way to manipulate young humans’ movements to meet societal etiquettes, is a repeating cycle of maladaptive coping mechanisms in response to the trauma of dissociation from our bodies and the larger body of the earth.

Another teacher and I were connecting deeply on all of these understandings, and we were finding that the setting we were in was limiting our abilities to really create freedom and holistic nourishment for the kids. We decided to open our own school. As we continued to learn about how humans grow healthfully, we realized how important being in wild spaces is for natural development. We knew that kids naturally learn anything that they need to know and that trust in them, trust in humans, trust in the natural processes of life were essential in order to provide the best possible environment for them to learn with ease and joy and fulfillment. We wanted to create the framework of the school to be based on meeting the kids’ needs, to create a flow to the day, and access to materials that supplied their intrinsic motivations. We also sought to highlight in our approach a sense of learning for the adults just as much for the kids. It was part of our outlook that when we found ourselves reacting to children from these maladaptive encultured ways, we would look deeply into ourselves to find the roots of our own behaviors, investigating our own experiences and trauma. Finally, we would rely on looking at what needed to change in the program to address each and every situation in which a child was motivated to push against whatever was happening at the time. We want to ask what does the child need at this moment that they are not getting? We got a grant, borrowed money from family, and put a lot on credit cards, and opened September of 2017. The building that we are currently in was the first place that we toured with our realtor. We felt it was a pretty clear signal that we were on the right path. During the beginning of the pandemic, my business partner moved to the southwest, and I became the sole owner and director.

Tchera Niyego: You are in the process of making some systematic changes in Elements Preschool, turning it into a “Learning Community.” Please tell us about how that is designed to play out?

Kirsten Voiles: Well, you can imagine just how difficult of an expectation it would be to ask teachers to overhaul their paradigms in order to work in this setting. We’ve had a great many adults come to work at Elements, both with early childhood education and experience and without, who have embraced this deeply personal work. At the same time, one has to be really committed to this enterprise in order to sustain this level of self-investigation. This isn’t what is taught when you go to school for education, and it is not a common expectation for working in preschools or daycares. Over the last year, it has been really difficult to hire folks who are in the place in their lives where this kind of undertaking is right for them, and I’ve struggled with how to appropriately imbue these ideals to teachers when the starting point of our relationship is one of employment. We all know how difficult it is to balance life, and then imagine that work life was asking you to take a deep dive into your own upbringing and unravel your assumptions of what it means to be a child and interact with young people.

At the beginning of last year, I asked the families at Elements if they would be willing to volunteer in a few different ways to help cover staff shortages, teacher absences, and emergency situations. Many families were excited to come to the woods with us in the morning or come play with us in the outdoor classroom in the afternoon. A few families who had already been working from home due to the pandemic had the ability to work from the school office. I trained a few parents on our indoor morning routine as support for teacher illness and vacations. At first, I thought this would just be a piecemeal solution to a temporary situation, but as I saw the benefits for the whole community of having families more directly involved at the school, I began to re-evaluate the energy that I was putting into hiring and training staff who may not have the bandwidth to be so personally invested in the school’s mission.

Sharing the philosophical approach with families during their time at the school has been deeply fulfilling and inspiring for me, connective and expansive for the kids, and overall seems to be having positive effects on parents’ relationships with their children at home and at school. Families have been excited about the insights that come out of their time sharing in their child’s preschool day. Ultimately, I’m hoping to aid in the release of stress and expectations that families feel in their daily lives, so there’s more space and energy for attunement with their kids and with themselves and their whole family unit.

With the way our society is currently structured, it may, at first, look like one more additional societal expectation to be involved in your child’s school, obligated to volunteer a certain amount, and help out with the school’s consistent functioning, but my hope is that the whole idea of a “learning community” will have the opposite result. We all struggle as parents in this individualized culture, feeling alone in our development and learning, criticizing ourselves and seeking advice about how to do it right and better. Many families have limited family and community to help out with additional childcare and resources. Working both inside and outside of the home can be depleting and compartmentalizing for many parents. Sending our children to daycare can be a very difficult experience and can create a feeling (sometimes subconsciously) of distancing our feelings of sacrifice and grief.

My hope is not only that this experience will create more connections between families involved in the school for mutual aid and support, but also that in this little environment we might begin to normalize asking for help and receiving generosity, between families and also between the caregivers/teachers in relationship with families as well. I think that what Elements has to offer is mutually beneficial for all of us, and I’d like to divest from a model that sees me as the owner of a business service and get down closer to the truth that we’re all raising these young humans together. The people who are caring for kids are really meaningful to the child’s development. It is really important to know what those people think and feel, and I want families to be immersed in that knowledge at Elements as much as possible.

So, families will take part going to the woods, dancing, and playing during music, doing art, building, and eating with us. Each family will take part as little or as much in other ways as they feel inspired and available. Some families will work from the office for a day, stepping out to eat with us or hear a story or just join us in the yard at the end of their day. We currently have a parent volunteer as the family coordinator who sets up a monthly get together outside of school hours, and we plan to have regular learning opportunities such as curriculum night and a guest speaker for deeper investigation.

Finally, I think this model can be nourishing and healing for this culture in general. Not only that children in this setting may be having a more holistic, freeing, and attuned experience of life with their natural learning and developmental abilities supplied by these essential nutrients, but also to be more closely woven into a community of diverse families with unique experiences to learn from and understand, and in which to become a meaningful part. Imagining a learning community of families beginning to unravel some of the neural pathways built up from growing up in a culturally evolved environment steeped in punishment and dominion: It’s a harrowing and enlightening prospect. The colonization upon which this culture was developed is deeply embedded in the ways that we move through life and in our perceptions of humans as disconnected from each other, disembodied from ourselves, and dissociated from our immersion in the earth. The many crises of our day and our history, from environmental destruction to every form of bias and racism, from the overall degradation of our health in all ways psychological, ethical, organic, and in all of our bodily systems to our escape mechanisms of violence, abuse, substance use, and materialism, can be seen through the lens of embodiment as the results of humans’ repeating cycle of mis-attunement. Seriously, what if learning how to attune would shift the trajectory of our individual and collective evolution?

Elements Preschool is located at 5141 Platt Road, Ann Arbor, 48108. To learn more about Elements Preschool please contact (734) 369-33-57 and visit elementspreschoolmi.com.