We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nicole Marie Majewski. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nicole Marie below.

Alright, Nicole Marie thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

What did my parents do right?

This is a powerful question for me at this season of my life and brings forth alot of big meaning for me.

I lost my mother 7 years ago and my father unexpectedly in January 2023.

Reflecting on what they did right and how they’ve impacted my life and who I am as a person is important for me right now and Im grateful for the opportunity.

I am 41 years old and I moved far away from home when I was a fresh 21 years old and haven’t lived with or near my parent since. And yet that didnt make our relationship any less strong and beautiful. In a way, it even strengthened it. They made monumental efforts to make me feel part of the family no matter what and to stay connected through technology, letters and visits.

For as long as I can remember, they made me feel like I could do anything. They were really good at that. They always provided with a perfect balance of independence and autonomy and protection and containment. For my rebellious adolescent self, sometimes it was too rigid….being the one who had to be home earlier than anyone on the weekend or eat dinner at the same time everynight or not having my own car until I could pay for it myself. But looking back now, I see what that actually did. They quite literally gave me deep roots so that my wings could fly. For that, I am eternally grateful.

Another thing that my parents did that I value deeply was let me know that my one life was mine and that I could do anything I wanted to do as an adult. Whether that was become a professional ballerina or a teacher, travel the world and be a gypsy, get a degree in social work and join Peace Corps, get married and have 100 kids, open a bagel shop, bikeride to south america, work in a thrift store or become president of the world. That was huge for me as a young person growing up in a school obsessed culture that had us on the career chasing path since we were little. They opened up another door for me in that world, they helped me to see that adulting wasnt only about that one job for the rest of your life. Adulthood was about LIVING and finding joy and doing what you love and being flexible along the way.

It is also clear to me today that being the daughter of a master pastry chef and a regenerative landscape designer, curious expressions of creativity and a connection to the natural world run thru my blood.

As an adult, I have experimented with all sorts of career directions and job choices over the past 3 decades….event planner, fundraising coordinator, production assistent, translator, blogger, cafe owner, tour guide and a mother! Everything they paved for me is present for me all the time.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

At this stage in my life, aside from being a mother to my 3 boys, I consider myself to be an educator, a guide for children.

I have a project called Iyari Play in Nayarit, Mexico and have been running unplugged play opportunities, events and classes for children in my region since 2017. I host story circles and pop-up play events and workshops and farm trips for children and their families in our community. Getting children off the screens and into books, games, art and exploration.

I also have 8 years of experience building and collaborating on micro-school initiatives and alternative educational projects.

In addition, I am part of the administrative team of The Cedarsong Way, one of the founding Forest School pedagogies of North America. Through my work with them, I am able to work with teachers and adults looking to start their own nature programs around the world. We also have a large community of educators, program directors and parents who connect regularly on calls and in trainings, looking to deepen their relationship with nature based learning.

I also offer consulting services for families looking for guidance in a variety of themes such as but not limited to alternative options to traditional schooling, how to disconnect from those systems, bilingualism at home, navigating disabilities or physical differences with our children and more. I am tapped into a wide network of International play projects and nature-based learning projects and have a unique perspective with both the English and Spanish speaking communities.

Our project, Iyari Play, works with an area that is a tourist destination and also quite rural. We serve communities of English speaking travelers and also local Spanish speaking families. We serve children from private schools and also local public schools. We volunteer our time giving creative workshops at the local.library and free pop-up events in the plaza and we also charge for our private events on our land. We aim to be inclusive and diverse in how we reach our community and how we navigate making a living with our work.

For me, this work is so critical right now. Putting a focus on nature based learning and slowing down. At a time where our world is quite literally burning and there is so much disconnect from nature and natural cycles and ecology and bio-regional systems, we MUST lean into those things as we move forward into the future. We MUST cultivate connection in our children and ourselves with our natural world. We need to touch the dirt and listen to the birds and notice the weather and get curious about the clouds and the seeds and all of the rhythms within us and around us.

It is always such a joyful thing to see children getting muddy in our mud-kitchen experiences or building something with cardboard that they envisioned on paper or finding that perfect book in the pile that they didnt know they were looking for.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Something that Ive had to unlearn over the years is my perception around what education actually is. Its been alot of unlearning, in fact.

Growing up in North America, school was life. I attended the Buffalo Public School system my whole childhood and loved school. I did well and thrived, most of the time, and really saw school and what I did there as a large part of my self perception and my value in the world.

Decades later, as a mother of young children and someone looking for alternatives to the traditional school options in our community, I quickly saw that what I knew about school and how it served families was very different than my perception as a child.

There isnt alot of opportunity to connect with nature at most schools and very little time for children to have free play and independent discovery opportunities. As early as preschool, the children are very much directed how to play, when to play and where to play.

Through my research and deep dives into alternative options of learning, I started to see that play was actually where learning happened. Having open ended activities not directed by adults, space and places to play freely and explore, time to just BE and to integrate a slower rhythm…all of that is so important in tbe lives of young ones.

That is all contrary to what my own educational path showed me to be learning and in fact, what society still believes to be education….

Education is very academic based, teaching children as young as 4 to read and write and sit still with a worksheet and do homework. Standardized tests and busy work and outdated subject content and all sorts of things that don’t actually enrich and nourish the minds, bodies and hearts of our young people.

And that meant that I had to unlearn all of the ways in which I myself as a teacher and parent had been taught to believe education was.

I had to look to nature, to open ended creative experiences, life skills that were learning points, expanding my mind around how children can learn and why we should care about that.

I had to start to sit back and watch as the kids navigated scissors and glue and rope ladders and mud buckets and magnifying glasses, instead of hovering and “helping them do it”.

I had to start to dive deeper into the process and science of play and all the ways I had been stifling play for the young people in my life instead of cultivating it and that everywhere around me and in the wide world, adults were doing the same.

And that unlearning is constant.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My social media audience is not large compared to influencers these days but is an audience that is engaged and participative.

Our following, across platforms, has always been organic. It has grown through word of mouth and real life connections. Many of our audience are people that know our work or have particpated in our programs or know us personally. We also have alot of peers in our audience, people who are working in similar fields and doing similar things out there in the world.

One thing I highly recommend is expanding your reach and search to the International stage. Search for similar projects to yours in different languages, use hashtags to search for profiles doing the same work. Even Google search for projects in different locations and follow their social media accounts. For example, I would search for “nature schools in England” and find some that aligned with us and that were doing beautiful work and follow them on social media.

By doing this, you are widening tour scope of awareness in your field and also broadening your opportunities for collaborations and connections around the world, as opposed and to only in your region.

And obviously, stay connected locally too. Don’t see other projects similar to yours closeby as competition, see them as collaborators, peers. Support their work, their posts and their initiatives and they will support yours.

One thing I’ve learned over the years as a social media manager and content creator for small businesses and -non profits is that metrics aren’t everything. If your videos never go viral but have 3 followers engaging and sharing inspiration in the comments, that is what matters. The idea of these social platforms as a business tool should be to cultivate connection and assist in your growth as a business and a person but that doesn’t need to look the same for everyone. Be creative, think out of the box and always remember that you and your business and its real life customers are what matter.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Iyariplay
• Facebook: iyariplay