Antioch School teacher Ann Guthrie, left, has spent 36 years observing and nurturing young students in the “social laboratory” of the Nursery program. This year marks her last in the classroom, as she passes the torch to Athena Potter, who was hired in 2021 to assist, and later succeed, Guthrie as the Nursery program’s lead teacher. (Submitted photo)
Antioch School Nursery teacher passes torch
- Published: October 1, 2024
Last week, longtime Antioch School Nursery teacher Ann Guthrie led the News through the school’s brightly lit halls. The sounds of laughter, piano tunes and story time drifted from in and around the school’s building, where Guthrie has taught for 36 years — and from which she will soon retire.
She gestured out a window at a group of young students who were elbow-deep in sand.
“Children need to interact,” she said. “They need to touch the grass and dig in the dirt; that’s kind of where they live. This setting is amazing for that.”
She credited the setting of the Antioch School, where children are encouraged to lead their own learning journeys through self-discovery and collaboration, with being an ideal place for her own learning journey through the ways and means of young children — in the Nursery, in particular, ages 3–5.
A self-described “science nerd” from an early age, Guthrie said some of her first curiosity as a young person was directed toward animal behavior.
“I ended up getting really interested in primates, so that was kind of where I was headed,” she said. “I was a biology student at Antioch College.”
That path of study, however, presented a conundrum for Guthrie. She was interested in ethology — observation and analysis of innate behavior within a natural environment — but the program in which she was enrolled in the 1960s was focused on behaviorism: study within a controlled environment and analysis of behavior with respect to that environment.
It was enough of an ethical conflict, she said, that she began to consider an alternative field.
“My first year at Antioch, I met the person I eventually married, and his suggestion was, why didn’t I go into education?” she said.
The leap from primate study to teaching, she added, was not a big one.
“Children — people — are primates, and so it made a lot of sense,” she said. “So that’s what I did.”
Guthrie received her bachelor’s degree in education from Antioch College, and completed her student teaching at the Antioch School. It was, she said, the ideal workplace for her — a natural environment for students, as opposed to a controlled one.
“I realized I couldn’t teach any other place,” she said — but at the time, there weren’t any open positions at the school.
Years later, when Guthrie brought her daughter to the school as a student, she reconnected with longtime former Younger Group teacher Bev Price — under whose leadership Guthrie had performed her student teaching — and in 1988 became part of the school’s staff.
“Luck was with me,” she said.
Throughout her decades as Nursery teacher, Guthrie has maintained her scientist’s curiosity, remaining interested, she said, in the personalities and temperaments of each of the students she has shepherded as they grew within the Nursery program before moving on to Kindergarten.
“What I love is that you never see repeats of personality,” she said. “I’m always interested in the individual, and how individuals create their social worlds.”
Paramount to Guthrie’s teaching philosophy is an understanding that children are, as she said, “competent human beings,” and the learning they do at a young age is important. In their way, children are themselves scientists — in Guthrie’s view, the Nursery program functions as a kind of “social laboratory” within which they discover themselves and one another.
“That’s really their work — they’re observing,” she said. “They’re bringing their unique selves to a group and figuring out how that works and polishing a few edges along the way.”
Kindergarten teacher Lindie Keaton noted that observation isn’t just crucial for students, but for teachers, too.
“Being observers is actually the biggest part of our job,” she said. “You can use what you know about children’s development and see something that might need to be addressed — maybe a vision screening or [occupational therapy] for sensory stuff is in order. If you don’t observe really carefully, you might miss it.”
Antioch School teachers work in tandem with their students to build a curriculum, Keaton said, alongside teachers’ “deep knowledge of child development and brain research.” Guthrie has, she said, been a leader to her fellow teachers at the Antioch School in observing and understanding early childhood behavior and development.
“Ann has always been very interested in neuroscience,” Keaton said. “We’re all learners, but she’s kind of been the person to shepherd all of us for a really long time.”
Learning how the young brain works has been an important, and evolving, piece of the Antioch School’s approach to learning, often with Guthrie at the forefront. By way of example, Keaton said she and her fellow teachers are deeply aware of the long debate within the educational world over phonics versus whole language — that is, whether it’s better for up-and-coming readers to first emphasize letters and sounds, or to introduce complete words and their contexts at the outset.
“I always went with giving students all the tools,” Keaton said. “And what we’ve discovered, as we’ve looked into [research on the developing brain] is that it’s complex — the analogy is that trying to describe what your brain is doing while you’re reading is like looking at a television and then trying to tell someone how a television works.”
Antioch School teachers meet weekly to discuss their classes, check in with and support one another and perform “deep dives” into various educational subjects, Keaton said. It’s where she’s gotten to know Guthrie as a teacher — but she said she first knew Guthrie through a different lens.
“My son was in Nursery with Ann, so I first learned from her as a parent,” Keaton said. “Just to think of how many parents she has impacted — if the world valued teachers more, I think people might know that Ann is a national treasure.”
Fostering relationships with parents like Keaton turned out to be Guthrie’s path toward discovering the person who would ultimately succeed her in her long-time position in the Nursery program: When Athena Potter brought her young son to tour the Antioch School in 2021, Guthrie said she had already begun looking for a replacement — and knew fairly quickly that Potter would be a natural fit.
“I met Athena and her son, and we spent some time together. We said ‘goodbye,’ and I told Lindie, ‘I found my assistant for next year — and she’s seven months pregnant,’” Guthrie said.
Potter remembered having a similar moment of clarity. She and her family, who live in Springfield, were looking for a new school for their son after he attended another school that wasn’t a good fit, followed by a year of homeschooling. The Potters first toured the Antioch School while classes were still being held remotely due to the pandemic, and later after Guthrie’s class had returned in person.
“My son got one foot into that front door, and he said, ‘This is my school,’” Potter said. “And if we weren’t sold already, Ann was all we needed to sell us 100%.”
At the time, because Potter had previously been homeschooling her son, her family was making do on a single income; she said she and her husband expected that they might only be able to afford a year of tuition for their son. However, a fortuitous email from Guthrie soon arrived, alerting Nursery program parents that she was looking for an assistant and asking for potential leads on a person to fill the position.
“I remember thinking during our Nursery classroom visit, ‘Wow, what a dream job — how do you win this lottery?’ And next thing I knew, we got this email,” Potter said. “I was pregnant at the time, so I sat on the email for a couple of weeks, but finally mustered up the courage to respond.”
Potter expressed her interest in taking the position — with one caveat: If hired, she’d have to bring her baby with her.
“And Ann’s response was incredibly supportive and encouraging — even excited,” she said. “So that’s how it all happened.”
Potter began assisting Guthrie in the classroom with her nine-week-old younger son in tow later that year, with the aim of eventually becoming the lead teacher in the Nursery program; this year marks Potter’s first as lead teacher, with Guthrie currently working part-time alongside her until the end of the school year. Both of Potter’s children are now students at the Antioch School.
“We have a way for both of them to be here now, all the way through Older Group,” Potter said.
With her elder son having moved through the Nursery program and her younger son now a student in her classroom, Potter said it’s been fascinating navigating the roles of both teacher and parent simultaneously.
“It’s helped me in my teaching, because I can really, with confidence now, say, ‘There’s a side of your children that you don’t know [at school],’” Potter said. “It gives children this opportunity to try out other personalities in a different environment where they’re responded to differently.”
Potter said her own teaching philosophy is similar to Guthrie’s, in that she leads with the premise that her young students are the best arbiters of their own burgeoning identities.
“Something I learned from Ann is this beautiful thing of supporting children to let them be who they are,” she said. “We’re not trying to form their clay into what we think they should be; we’re just like, ‘Oh, you’re a lump of clay — and you are beautiful as a lump and in every other form.”
The past few years of experience in the classroom have netted Potter some of her own wisdom, too — particularly when it comes to what risk management looks like for 3- to 5-year-olds.
“Ann always says, ‘We just have to keep people comfortable’ — and something I’ve added to that is, ‘and safe,’” she said. “‘Safety’ is such an incredible word, and means so many things to different people; I always thought being comfortable encompassed safety, but for some it’s a separate thing.”
With that in mind, Potter said she’s learned that the best way to maintain both comfort and safety for her students is simply to be fully present and available for her students, always observing closely and learning who her students are as individuals, as Guthrie did for so many years.
“The children have the opportunity to safely take risks in these early years,” she said. “When they can try things early on, with autonomy, they gain really great risk assessment that carries forward and helps them stay safe as older people.”
She added: “And if they need me, I’m there.”
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