From the Guest Editor – Learning to See: The Prospect School's Teacher Education Program's Beginnings

Abstract

In this introduction to the processes of descriptive inquiry, the author offers a brief history of the Prospect School and its programs, as well as a description of the processes and their philosophical underpinnings.

Notes

¹The Vermont Design can be found at http://www.vsse.net/broadsides.

²This orientation, Carini hastened to point out, was, from her perspective, of a different quality than “child study,” carried out at other institutions like Bank Street where there seemed, according to her, to be a more psychological/personality-based orientation (interview with Carini, June 28, 2005). Bank Street's own literature claims a focus on child “development” but does not use the words psychological or personality in its description of its work (A Brief History: Bank Street College of Education <http://www.bankstreet.edu/gems/about/ABriefHistory.pdf>)

³According to its Web site (http://www.ndsg.org/history.html) the North Dakota Study Group (NDSG) was founded in 1972 by Vito Perrone while Dean of the School of Education at the University of North Dakota. It “brought together educators from many parts of the U.S. to discuss common concerns about accountability of schools and assessment of children. … Since then, the group has amounted to an ongoing seminar on democratic possibilities in U.S. and world education, branching out to include related issues such as racial tensions in schools and classrooms, issues of culture, class and gender, social justice and activism, but always returning to the themes of accountability and assessment.”

⁴The Prospect Archives were moved in 2007 from North Bennington, Vermont to the University of Vermont's Special Collections in Burlington.

⁵From “A Statement of Philosophy: Teacher Education Program, The Prospect School.” A document submitted to the Vermont state Department of Education, March 1, 1974.

⁶ Dewey (1916/1980) characterized education as “that organization and reorganization of experience that adds to the meaning of experience and [one's] ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (p. 76).

⁷All children with work in the Prospect archives were given pseudonyms, represented by use of brackets.

⁸ Interestingly, Prospect was aided in their development of this process by Beth Alberti, a scholar of art history and museum curator in New York.