Our mission is
to help the highly and profoundly gifted
and
those who work to improve their lives.
We never outgrow the need for a community in which we can feel seen, accepted, and supported.
2023 Summer Hollingworth Institute
Course Schedule
*************Archive of ***********
2023 Spring Hollingworth Institute
Course Schedule
*************Archive of ***********
2022 Autumn Hollingworth Institute
Live Course Schedule
ARCHIVE of 2022 Spring Break Hollingworth Institute
Live Course Schedule
ARCHIVE of 2022 Winter Hollingworth Institute
Live Course Schedule
ARCHIVE of 2021 Fall Hollingworth Institute
Live Course Schedule
Welcome to our community
We value testing for its ability to help enhance understanding of individuals’ needs. However, in this community, if what we offer is useful to you,
you are welcome with no tests required.
Please pardon our dust while we get the website up and running. It was important to get the live classes up in order to meet the social and intellectual needs as soon as possible.
coming soon:
more live classes
a ‘free to all’ set of resources
a membership social network community with topic-driven discussions
video courses with accompanying social network to allow deeper exploration
coming later (after COVID issues are resolved and the majority of children are vaccinated):
We will have an in-person location for social gatherings and classes. We expect to have game nights, book clubs, singing, and more in the big purple house in Malden MA on the Boston MBTA.
We will endeavor to organize regional gatherings as well.
Our team
There are many people working to help get Hollingworth up and running,
Here are a few of them:
Lisa Fontaine-Rainen
Director of Live Online Courses
(she/her) has been teaching gifted children in the public school system and working with homeschoolers for 20 years. She earned her MA in Gifted Education from William and Mary in 2001, and has been lucky to be able to work with these amazing young people ever since. Lisa relocated with her family to South Africa in 2014. When she’s not teaching she loves to read, play games, do puzzles, and experiment in the kitchen with her two gifted homeschooled children. Both children have been largely unscathed by this so far. Teaching and learning are passions – schooling is not.
Karen “Boots” MacFarlane,
Contributor and Board Member
bio coming tomorrow
Dr Bonnie Kneen, Instructor
(She/her) started her career as an editor, and worked in school textbook publishing in South Africa and at Oxford University Press in the UK. More recently, she taught in the English Department of the University of Pretoria, where she earned her PhD in English Literature. She has co-written school textbooks and edited short story collections for schools, and her research has been published in international scholarly journals. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, girlhood studies, and children’s and young adult literature. She will be a happy woman if she can spend the rest of her life reading, teaching and doing research.
Andrew Piltser Cowan Instructor, Board Member
Andrew Piltser Cowan (they/them) grew up in Ames, Iowa, graduating from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy, with a minor in German. They graduated cum laude from Cornell Law School in 2008, with a concentration in advocacy. In Law school, Andy won the CALI Excellence for the Future Award in Federal Jurisdiction and the school’s Freeman Award for Civil-Human Rights. While in law school, Andy volunteered to help clean up legal issues that arose in the wake of Hurricane Katrina with the Pro Bono Project of New Orleans, earning a letter of commendation from the Louisiana Supreme Court. Andy worked as a public defender in Greater Boston before establishing PiltserCowan Law in 2013. In 2012, he was again honoured by Cornell Law School with their Rising Star Award for Exemplary Public Service. Andy was one of the Young Adult Program coordinators for Beyond IQ Boston from 2012-2019, and currently serves as Secretary on the board of the Hollingworth Institute.
Anna Caveney, Instructor and Founder/Board Member
(she/her) has been the Hollingworth Center for Highly and Profoundly Gifted Children YA Coordinator and Board Member, BIQYA Coordinator, the Director of the MIT ESP summer program for gifted high schoolers and instigator of the CORE critical thinking and interpersonal communication skills component of that program. She developed a model of underachievement called Motivational Paralysis and has continued studying motivation and identity as well as the power of narrative to reshape lives. Anna viewed parenting from the outside before jumping in with a teenager. Since then, she has embarked on a lifelong study of parenting from the beginning of the process with the assistance of her 8-year-old daughter. Anna and her family have recently returned to New England after a 20-year adventure.