Facilitating Play Faculty

Lorayne Carbon, BA, SUNY Buffalo. MSEd., Bank Street College of Education. Director, SLC Early Childhood Center, 2003-present. Former classroom teacher, childcare center director, and adjunct professor. Workshop leader at seminars and conferences on early childhood education. Special areas of interest include social justice issues in the early childhood classroom and creating aesthetic learning environments for young children.

Lorraine Ehlers-Flint, PhD, is a clinical and developmental psychologist with extensive experience working with children and their families in private settings, as well as schools, hospitals, and community agencies. She lectures on topics related to children on the autistic spectrum and the use of the Floortime/DIR approach. Dr Ehlers-Flint is also a trainer and supervisor of professionals in psychology and related fields in the US and in Latin America. She is a faculty member of the DIR Institute and the Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders (ICDL). Originally from Buenos, Aires, Argentina, Dr. Ehlers-Flint is in private practice in New York.

Kim Ferguson BA, Knox College. MA, PhD, Cornell University. Psychology (2007-present) & the Art of Teaching (2010-present) faculty. She is a developmental and cultural psychologist with special interests in sustainable, community based participatory action research, cultural-ecological approaches to infant and child development, children at risk (children in poverty, HIV/AIDS orphans, children in institutionalized care), health and cognitive development, development in African contexts, and the impact of the physical environment on child development. Author of articles and book chapters on African and American infants' language learning, categorization and face processing, the built environment and physical and mental health, and relationships between the quality of southern African orphan care contexts and child development and health.

Margery B. Franklin, BA, Swarthmore College. MA, PhD, Clark University. Former Director of the Child Development Institute. Professor Emerita, SLC (psychology faculty from 1965-2002). Areas of interest include language development, psychology of art and play, educational theory and practice. Author of articles and book chapters on children's language, play, artistic development, developmental theory; co-editor of Development and the Arts: Critical Perspectives; Developmental Processes: Heinz Werner's Selected Writings; Symbolic Functioning in Childhood; and Child Language: A Reader. Fellow of the American Psychological Association and past president of the APA division, Society for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Sarah Phillips Mathews, a graduate of Vassar College, also holds a Master’s degree in the Art of Teaching from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently Lead Teacher in the Fours Class at the Sarah Lawrence College Early Childhood Center, where she has also taught Twos and Threes during the past 18 years. Her previous experience includes research at Children’s Hospital in Boston on early brain development, as well as teaching at the Harvard Law School Childcare Center and the Bank Street School for Children. Her main areas of interest are separation; conflict resolution and community building in the classroom; and block play, on which she leads a yearly graduate seminar.

Cindy Puccio is in private practice in NYC and Westchester, seeing typically developing children for play therapy and doing Floortime/DIR with children with special needs, mainly children on the Autistic spectrum. Right out of graduate school, she worked for four years at The Learning Center in Riverdale doing psycho-remediation with children with a range of language needs and disorders. She then moved to Los Angeles and worked part-time at a mental health agency and part-time in a public elementary school doing individual, family and group therapy. When she returned to New York, she resumed her private practice. She has an MA in Child Development from Sarah Lawrence College and an MSW from NYU. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health and Developmental Disorders.

Marie Reynolds is a part-time associate at the Family Life Ministries Counseling Centre in Kingston, Jamaica, where she practices play therapy to address young children’s emotional and behavioral needs. Privately, she conducts in-home play therapy with children on the Autistic spectrum and their families. Marie is dedicated to increasing Jamaica’s awareness of the power of play and to expanding Jamaican children’s access to play and play therapy. To this end, she is a participant in the Jamaica Play Coalition and lectures an introductory play therapy graduate course at the Mico University College. She received her MSW from New York University, and she also holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Counseling Psychology emphasis).

Barbara Schecter is Director of the Graduate Program in Child Development at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a developmental psychologist with a special interest in cultural psychology, developmental theories, and language development. She is an author and researcher on cultural issues in development and metaphoric thinking in children. In addition to her many other graduate and undergraduate course offerings, she has developed a new course on "Play and Culture," which she taught during Spring 2008. Barbara currently holds the Roy E. Larsen Chair in Psychology. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA and PhD from Teachers College Columbia University.