Educator Tells Teachers to Listen, Let Kids Explore

CONTACT: Philip Montgomery
PHONE: (713) 831-4792

EDUCATOR TELLS TEACHERS TO LISTEN, LET KIDS EXPLORE

If you want to teach children astronomy,
forget the standard lecture on celestial bodies, says Eleanor
Duckworth, a Harvard expert in learning. Just hand the kids a moon
journal and send them into the night.

Duckworth, a Harvard professor of education, believes in helping
people develop independent thinking and the ability to acquire
knowledge firsthand. For example, rather than lecture children about
the motion of the plants and stars, she has them keep moon journals
in which they record their nightly observations of our nearest
neighbor in outer space.

The Harvard educator will be at Rice to express her views about
education and science when she delivers the annual Hazel Creekmore
Symposium talk at 4:30 p.m., May 16, in the Grand Hall of the Rice
University student center. Her lecture is titled “The Having of
Wonderful Ideas: An Educator Talks About Children Understanding
Science.” The event is free and open to the public.

Duckworth is the torchbearer of the work of Swiss psychologist
Jean Piaget, who died in 1980 and is considered by many educators to
be the major figure in 20th-century developmental psychology.
She served as the translator and protegee to Piaget during the
last 15 years of his life. Since that time she has become renowned
as a leading developmental psychologist. She is now chair of the
Learning and Teaching Area in the Graduate School of Education at
Harvard.

The Hazel G. Creekmore Memorial Curriculum Collection at the
Fondren Library on the Rice University campus was established in
1993. The collection provides teachers, education students and Rice
faculty with professional resources about curriculum, teaching and
children.

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