TOPIC:
Education For
Understanding
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth
A. Hobbs Professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as Adjunct
Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Adjunct Professor
of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and
Co-Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner
received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. He has been awarded
fourteen honorary degrees--including degrees from Princeton University,
McGill University and Tel Aviv University on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel. In 1990, he was
the first American to receive the University of Louisville's
Grawemeyer Award in education.
The author of eighteen books and several
hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles
for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion
that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be
assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past
fifteen years, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working
on the design of performance-based assessments, education for
understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve
more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Most
recently, Gardner has been carrying out intensive case studies
of exemplary creators and leaders; he and colleagues have launched
an investigation of the relationship between cutting-edge work
in different domains and a sense of social responsibility for
the use and implications of that work. Gardner is the author
of eighteen books which have been translated into twenty languages.
His two most recent books are 'The Disciplined Mind: What All
Students Should Understand' (Simon & Schuster, 1999) and
'Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century'
(Basic Books, 1999).
