Professional path
Shortly after completing my master degree, I was offered an opportunity to join an academic team to teach … I specialized in methodology of teaching, curriculum design and testing.
— Joanna Cutts, Founder
I was born in Puck, a small medieval town on the Baltic Sea in Poland. After living there for 14 years, I left home for a boarding school near Warsaw (in Otwock) and started studies of nuclear physics, followed by theology and philosophy at the Warsaw University.
Intrigued by German philosophers, I decided to exclusively study German to read Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein in the original. From 1989 to 1990 I studied at the Vienna University (a happy time!). Back in Poland, I enrolled in German studies, focusing on literature and second language acquisition. Shortly after completing my master degree, I was offered an opportunity to join an academic team to teach at the newly opened NKJO (College for German and English Teachers), where I specialized in methodology of teaching, curriculum design and testing. While there, I worked on German textbooks for middle schools and was involved in the production of an educational TV program (“The Familie Ganzegal”) for ageless viewers.
I left Poland in September 1997 to become a visiting scholar at Brown University. After a literary workshop in which I presented possible ways of teaching literature courses at an academic level to non-native speakers, I was offered a year long job at Connecticut College where I taught 19th century German literature. While teaching there I designed and taught a course in intellectual history at Brown.
Personal path
I have come to realize that there are very few places that honor the ageless thinking of a child and the need to access fields of interest with our senses and intuition before the knowing happens.
— Joanna Cutts, Founder
Cogitania might have never existed if not for my two sons.
At the age of 32, I left Poland to conduct research in the States at Brown. While there, I became engaged to my soulmate, Shaun Cutts, who I had first met in Vienna in 1989.
The birth of my first son, in May 2000, forever changed me. In order to experience being a full-time mother, I left the world of ideas to inhabit a purely physical world, governed by digestive needs, instinct and senses … or so I thought. Not only was I mistaken, but surprisingly I realized how much I LOVED this new experience. It was fascinating to watch my son’s determination as he realized that not only was he a body, but that his body included intriguing parts to it that could help him conquer and understand the world around him.
For the first time since my own childhood, I took time to observe the simple. Connected back to the instinct and intuition, I slowed down to sense the world, and reason alongside the growing mind of my son. How unexpected it was to realize that being a mother would not be a monotonous experience after all!
With my son, we enrolled in all the possible museums we could find in the Boston area and took time to travel and wonder. Thankful for the experiences we had, I have come to realize that there are very few places that honor the ageless thinking of a child and the need to access fields of interest with our senses and intuition before the knowing happens. There were lectures, exhibits, movies, but few people to take time to interact, guide and enhance the learning. I did not want my children, to become vessels into which knowledge is poured depending on what might be considered an understanding of age development modeled around a given cultural/educational standard. My hope for my boys was to give them the opportunity to discover how fun it is to learn and explore, even if they felt tired or frustrated. I wanted them to “dwell and explore”.
Out of my experiences of being a teacher and a mother, Cogitania is born, a place in which the thinking of a person “no matter how small” or old is honored with all the accumulated wealth of knowledge and discoveries. I look forward to sharing this journey with you.
