Influences

On the path toward understanding there are visionaries who help light the way. This page lists several major thinkers and researchers who have influenced my conception of education, its role in our lives, and my role as an educator.

Howard Gardner,

For his theory of Multiple Inteligences. As educators we need to be able to identify, and build upon our students' strengths. Gardner's ideas redefine and reevaluate how humans can be intelligent and provide an effective and holistic approach to integrating the wide range of capacities that our students have to offer.

  • The Gardner School
  • Creating Minds
  • Multiple Intelligences

    • Paulo Freire,

    The Brazilian educator, for his theory of Liberatory Education. Works like Pedagogy of the Oppressed have led me to redefine what education doesor should do. Humans are born into environments in which strong and established forces are at work: political, natural, and social. These forces hold us in various states of bondage. Education in this light becomes the process of breaking free from the forces that have us in bondage: it is a liberatory engagement.

    "Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it beocmes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

    More to come...