Assistant Director

Anastasia is the Assistant director of the Thinking Playground and currently the coordinator for the UFV Centre for Philosophy for Children. She has been a faculty member at UFV for the past 25 years and has taught critical thinking to hundreds of university students and co-authored a textbook on reasoning called Think it Through: Reasoning in Everyday Life (Nelson, 2006).

Anastasia learned to appreciate children’s ability to think deeply and to ask important, challenging questions when, as a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, she taught at the Peel regional school district’s summer camp for gifted elementary school students. (Not to speak of what she has learned about children’s reasoning abilities from raising three children of her own!) Her continuing research into children’s rights led her to attend the Institute for Advancement of Philosophy for Children summer program and receive training in the IAPC method of philosophy for children.

Everyone knows that thinking skills give us the tools we need to navigate an often difficult world. Not everyone knows that children can start mastering these skills at a young age with activities and projects that are age-appropriate, nurturing, creative, and fun. Anastasia is excited to be part of the organizing team that is bringing the Thinking Playground Camps to children in the Fraser Valley and will be thinking and having fun this summer right along with the campers!