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Director

Jana Mohr Lone (jana@philosophyforchildren.org)

Director Jana Mohr Lone is the founder of the Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington's Department of Philosophy. Since 1995 she has facilitated philosophy sessions with kindergarten to high school students, and introduced college and graduate students, K-12 teachers, parents and others to methods for bringing philosophy into young people’s lives. She is the author of The Philosophical Child, a book for parents and others about ways to inspire philosophical conversations with children (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), and writes the blog Wondering Aloud: Philosophy With Young People. Since 2009 she has been chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy. She spends a lot of time talking with her three sons about questions such as whether life has any meaning.

Education Director

David Shapiro (david@philosophyforchildren.org)

Education Director David Shapiro is a faculty member at Cascadia Community College, where he teaches college philosophy classes that draw heavily upon his experiences and lesson plans for doing philosophy with pre-college students. In his role as Education Director of the NW Center for Philosophy for Children, he has been doing philosophy with young people in and around the Seattle area since he was a graduate student at the University of Washington way back in the 20th century. David is the author and/or co-author of six books, including most recently, Plato Was Wrong! Footnotes on Doing Philosophy with Young People, a compendium of activities, exercises, and games he has developed for exploring philosophical questions in the classroom and beyond.

Program Director

Sara Goering (sara@philosophyforchildren.org)

Program Director Sara Goering teaches philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle, Department of Philosophy, where she is also a member of the Program on Values in Society. During her graduate studies, she did a philosophy for children training at Montclair's Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC), and then co-founded a summer philosophy camp for high school students and a philosophy outreach program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At California State University Long Beach, she helped to create the Center for the Advancement of Philosophy in Schools (CAPS), which trained college students and partnered them with local teachers to lead philosophy discussions with young thinkers from 4th grade through high school. The Long Beach program also ran a summer philosophy institute for "at-risk" Long Beach high school students. Now she co-teaches the UW philosophy for children courses, which send undergraduate teams out to lead weekly philosophy discussions with young students in the Seattle Public Schools, and co-organizes summer workshops for teachers. In summer 2011, she gave a TEDx talk on philosophy for children.

Board of Directors

Elizabeth B. Lyell (President) Philosophy Teacher Highline Community College		Dr. Paul T. Menzel Provost / Professor of Philosophy Pacific Lutheran University
Sutapa Basu Director, Women's Center University of Washington		Dr. Ronald M. Moore Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Washington
Vicky Hutchings Teacher Whitman Middle School, Seattle		Dr. Ann Margaret Sharp Professor of Education Associate Director, IAPC Montclair State University
Dr. Matthew Lipman Professor of Philosophy Director, IAPC Montclair State University		Christine A. Stickler Director, The Pipeline Project University of Washington