Eleanor Duckworth Explained

Region:Western Philosophy
Eleanor Ruth Duckworth
Birth Place:Montreal, Quebec, Canada
School Tradition:Constructivism
Main Interests:Cognitive development, science education, curriculum, teacher education

Eleanor Ruth Duckworth (born 1935) is a teacher, teacher educator, and psychologist.

Duckworth earned her Ph.D. (Docteur en sciences de l'éducation) at the Université de Genève in 1977. She grounds her work in Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder's insights into the nature and development of understanding and intelligence and in their clinical interview method. She was also an elementary school teacher. Her participation in the 1960s curriculum development projects Elementary Science Study and African Primary Science Program was germinal for her insights and practices in exploratory methods in teaching and learning. She has conducted teacher education, curriculum development, and program evaluation in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and her native Canada.

Early life

Duckworth is the daughter of Jack and Muriel Duckworth, Canadian peace workers and social and community activists. Jack Duckworth, born in 1897, was a highly regarded leader in the national YMCA movement and an outspoken pacifist from the 1930s until his death in 1975.[1] Muriel Duckworth was one of the 1000 women worldwide nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

She is the sister of Montreal filmmaker Martin Duckworth,[2] and Nova Scotia businessman and musician John Duckworth.

(Re-)discovering Piaget

Piaget's work was little known in the North American educational community after World War II until Eleanor Duckworth, a student of Piaget at that time, introduced his methods and analysis into the classroom and the US educational research community.

Eleanor Duckworth first met Jean Piaget in 1957 in Paris at the Sorbonne where she was a graduate student. For the next two years Duckworth studied with Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder at the Institut des Sciences de l'Education in Geneva, Switzerland. She served as a research and teaching assistant for the second of those years. She subsequently entered a doctoral program in cognitive psychology at Harvard University, and dropped out. She returned to Geneva to finish her doctorate.

At Inhelder's recommendation, Duckworth began to participate in the Elementary Science Study (ESS) in 1962, a curriculum development and science education reform project that grew out of MIT and became the foundation of the organization now known as Education Development Center. The project was initiated by Jerrold Zacharias. The project involved "[putting] physical materials into children's hands from the start and help[ing] each child investigate through these materials the nature of the world around him [stet]" (ESS, 1970, p. 7). Teachers and students experimented with natural materials like bulbs, batteries, pendulums or butterflies, ice cubes and earthworms. During her four years as a staff member at the ESS, Duckworth struggled to incorporate the theory and clinical method of Piaget into the work she and her colleagues did in classrooms (Duckworth, 2006, p. 1).[3]

In 1964, Duckworth acted as the English translator and interpreter of Piaget during a bi-coastal conference at Cornell University and University of California, Berkeley.[4] Duckworth reported to her colleagues at the ESS about the conference in the paper, "Piaget Rediscovered". A collection of papers on developmental psychology and curriculum development was then developed into a book of the same name, which helped to re-awaken interest in Piaget's work among educators. She sought work as elementary school teacher in Montreal. In 1970 she took a job at the Atlantic Institute of Education, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as director of "The Lighthouse Project", a curriculum development and teacher education program for the four Atlantic provinces of Canada.

Collaborating with Jeanne Bamberger at the Division for Study and Research in Education at MIT, they initiated "The Teacher Project". During this project Duckworth and Bamberger worked to facilitate research experiences among teachers who worked in elementary schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1978. Duckworth continued to work with a smaller group of these same teachers for seven more years. This group, the Moon Group, explored the behaviour of the moon as a practice of learning and teaching. She wrote essays based on some of these experiences with Piaget, the Cambridge Teacher Project, the Moon Group, and her own teaching in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas.

The developmentalist tradition

Within teacher education in the United States in the twentieth century, Duckworth's contributions relate to a progressive or developmentalist approach. The idea of a teacher acting as a researcher is embraced by the following four traditions of reflective teaching practice: academic, social efficiency, developmentalist and social reconstructivist. The developmentalist tradition considers that the teacher is both a practitioner and a researcher. (Zeichner, 1992, p. 165).

Duckworth (2006, p. xiii) wrote in her book The Having of Wonderful Ideas that she built her developmental approach on two foundations very powerful to her:

  1. The work of Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder. Two aspects in the work of Piaget and Inhelder were especially important for Duckworth (2005b, pp. 258–259): First, the basic idea of assimilation, that is, every person creates meaning on her own, while taking any experience into her own schemes, structures, previous understanding. Second, the clinical interviewing or clinical method, that is, engaging children in talking about their ideas with a researcher.
  2. Her experience with the Elementary Science Study (ESS) curriculum development program. This program is consistent with the work of Piaget and Inhelder in psychology and it is considered to be a milestone in the history of science education. The Elementary Science Study tackled the following main question: "So how do we present material 'from without' so that the activity that 'the mind itself undergoes' is valuable?" (Duckworth, 2005a, p. 142)

The central question of Duckworth's (2006: xiv) research over five decades continues to be: "How do people learn and what can anyone do to help?" In the process of investigating this question, she has developed a research method which she has called expanded clinical interviewing, teaching/learning research and critical exploration. These three phrases emerged in the course of her research and are used interchangeably (Duckworth, 2006, p. xv).

Critical Exploration

Bärbel Inhelder first applied the name critical exploration to Piaget's clinical interviewing which included observing children as well as interviewing and interacting with a child who is experimenting and investigating a problem set by the researcher. Inhelder introduced this method to pedagogical contexts (Inhelder, Sinclair & Bovet, 1974, pp. 18–20). Duckworth (2005b, pp. 258–259) describes critical exploration as having two facets: curriculum development and pedagogy. In the context of critical exploration, curriculum development means: the teacher is planning how to engage students' minds in exploring the subject matter. Pedagogy constitutes the practice by which teachers invite students to express their thoughts:

During critical exploration, exploring goes on in two modes: In one mode, the child explores the subject matter and in the other mode, the researcher-teacher explores the child's thinking. Hence, for the teacher, critical exploration finds itself at the nexus of research and teaching where teacher and learner support each other (Shorr, 2007, pp. 369–370):

Consequently, Duckworth (2008b) suggests that a classroom teacher can take on the role of a researcher. The teacher explores too, by interacting with students' learning. It is the teacher's work to present engaging problems, and attend to students' ways of figuring them out helping them to notice what's interesting. For example, the teacher listens to students explain their ideas and asks them questions that seek to take students' thinking further (Duckworth, 2006, pp. 173–174).

The main ideas of the teaching/learning research

Outlining her approach, Duckworth (2006, p. 173) states: "As a student of Piaget, I was convinced that people must construct their own knowledge and must assimilate new experiences in ways that make sense to them. I knew that, more often than not, simply telling students what we want them to know leaves them cold". Considering learning and teaching, critical exploration stresses the following aspects:

Teacher education

If teachers are to teach their students exploratively, they must have experienced learning as explorers themselves (Duckworth, 2006). In the teacher education work that Duckworth does at Harvard University and elsewhere, she provides teachers with the opportunity to live through and think about the phenomena of teaching and learning. She involves teacher education students in the effort to understand somebody else's understanding. She considers it important for teachers to know what their students are understanding, that is: what sense the students are making of the subject matter (Duckworth in Meek, 1991, p. 32).

In her courses at Harvard University she applies her teaching approach by using critical exploration to teach critical exploration. Her famous T-440 course titled Teaching and Learning: "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" is usually conducted with two parallel groups, each having up to 50 teacher education students. Duckworth states on her course website: "The course starts from the premise that there are endless numbers of adequate pathways for people to come to understand subject matters. Curriculum and assessment must build on this diversity. A second premise is that every person can get involved with and enjoy and get good at every subject matter."[8]

In her university teaching Duckworth (2006, pp. 9, 173–192) tries to engage teacher education students with three major kinds of teaching and learning phenomena:

  1. Films and/or (life) demonstrations with one or two children or adolescents. In this way teacher education students can observe children/adults learning while instructors are teaching by engaging those learners and by listening and understanding the explanations of those learners;
  2. Teacher education students carry out a similar inquiry outside of classtime, where they meet with one or two people who are their practice learners. In this way, each teacher education student creates, on his own, a trial critical exploration for learners and then reflects on it in writing;
  3. Teacher education students learn as a group about a particular subject other than teaching and learning. Through this exploratory study by the group, the teacher education students are learning in the same way that the children in their classes will be learning. This subject could be from any area of study such as: pendulums, mathematical permutations, history, arts and poems.

Awards (selection)

Bibliography (selection)

References

Notes and References

  1. See https://www.oxfam.ca/donate/jack-and-murial-duckworth-fund-for-active-global-citizenship
  2. News: Moving with the Life. Maurie Alioff and Susan Schouten Levine. June 1987. Cinema Canada. Reprinted in Point of View. February 3, 2016. January 7, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20190107181117/http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/moving-with-the-life. dead.
  3. Duckworth states: "My colleagues did not seem to be any the worse for not taking Piaget seriously. Nor, I had to admit, did I seem to be any the better. Schools were such complicated places compared with psychology labs that I couldn't find a way to be of any special help. Not only did Piaget seem irrelevant, I was no longer sure that he was right. For a couple of years, I scarcely mentioned him and simply went about the business of trying to be helpful, with no single instance, as I recall, of drawing directly on any of his specific findings" (2006, p. 2).
  4. Verne N. Rockcastle, the conference director of the bi-coastal conference in 1964, wrote in the conference report of the Jean Piaget conferences: "Piaget, when looking over the list of participants at the Cornell conference, noticed with pleasure that Eleanor Duckworth of Educational Services, Inc., was going to attend. She had studied with Piaget and knew both him and his theories well. With little urging she agreed to translate Piaget's lectures for the conference. It soon was apparent that Duckworth was a real key to the success of the Cornell conference. She was outstanding not only in her interpretation of Piaget's complex phraseology, but in her fielding and translating of the questions directed at Piaget at the close of each of his lectures. There was not any question but that she should translate at Berkeley as well. Again, the success of the conference was due in large measure to her superb translations" (1964, p. xi).
  5. "Exploring ideas can only be to the good, even if it takes time. Wrong ideas, moreover, can only be productive. Any wrong idea that is corrected provides far more depth than if one never had a wrong idea to begin with. You master the idea much more thoroughly if you have considered alternatives, tried to work it out in cases where it didn't work, and figured out why it was that it didn't work, all of which takes time" (Duckworth, 2006, p. 70).
  6. A good learning situation "[m]ust permit the child to establish plans to reach a distant goal, while leaving him wide freedom to follow his own routing" (Blanchet, 1977, p. 37 cited in Duckworth, 2006, p. 42). "If we can create situations like this, then differences among children are by definition taken into account – without our having to diagnose in advance each child's level in a dozen domains. We can also be sure that children will take their own individual notions further as they strive to make sense of any situation [...]" (Duckworth, 2006, p. 48).
  7. There are two aspects to providing occasions for wonderful ideas. One is being willing to accept children's ideas. The other is providing a setting that suggests wonderful ideas to children - different ideas to different children - as they are caught up in intellectual problems that are real to them (Duckworth, 2006, p. 7).
  8. https://courses.my.harvard.edu/psp/courses/EMPLOYEE/EMPL/h/?tab=HU_CLASS_SEARCH&SearchReqJSON=%7B%22PageNumber%22%3A1%2C%22PageSize%22%3A%22%22%2C%22SortOrder%22%3A%5B%22IS_SCL_SUBJ_CAT%22%2C%22IS_SCL_DESCR100%22%5D%2C%22Facets%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22Category%22%3A%22HU_SCL_SCHEDULED_BRACKETED_COURSES%22%2C%22SearchPropertiesInResults%22%3Atrue%2C%22FacetsInResults%22%3Atrue%2C%22SaveRecent%22%3Afalse%2C%22TopN%22%3A%22%22%2C%22SearchText%22%3A%22having%20of%20wonderful%22%2C%22DeepLink%22%3Afalse%7D See courses.my.harvard.edu

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