Duckworth earned her Ph.D. 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.
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.[citation needed]
She is the sister of Montreal filmmaker Martin Duckworth[2] and Nova Scotia businessman and musician John Duckworth.
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 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.
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; and second the clinical interviewing or clinical method, that is, engaging children in talking about their ideas with a researcher.
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
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 that 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.
Critical exploration as a research method requires just as much resourcefulness in finding appropriate materials, questions, and activities as any good curriculum development does. Whether it be poems, mathematical situations, historical documents, liquids, or music, our offerings must provide some accessible entry points, must present the subject matter from different angles, elicit different responses from different learners, open a variety of paths for exploration, engender conflicts, and provide surprises; we must encourage learners to open out beyond themselves, and help them realize that here are other points of view yet to be uncovered – that they have not yet exhausted the thoughts they might have about this matter.
—(Duckworth, 2006, p. 140).
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).
Critical exploration, then, as a research method, has two aspects: 1) developing a good project for the child to work on; and 2) succeeding in inviting the child to talk about her ideas: putting her at ease, being receptive to all answers; being neutral to the substance of the answer while being encouraging about the fact that the child is thinking and talking; getting the child to keep thinking about the problem, beyond the first thought that comes to her; getting her to take her thinking seriously.
—(Duckworth, 2005b, p. 259)
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.
Students bring their prior expectations, interests and knowledge to the learning experience. (Duckworth, 2006, p. 12).[3]
Students need something complex that challenges them to explore. (Duckworth, 2002).
Teacher acts as facilitator with a researcher mind-set.[4][5]
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."[6]
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:
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;
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;
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 (selected)
Inaugural Barbara K. Lipman Award for Advances in Early Childhood Education given annually to a researcher, writer or program designer who has significantly influenced early childhood education or child growth and development, University of Memphis (2008).
The book "The having of wonderful ideas" and other essays on teaching and learning won the American Educational Association Award for writing on teaching and teacher education (1987).
Inaugural Catherine Molony Memorial Lecture at City College School of Education, Workshop Center for Open Education (1979).
Duckworth, E.R. (1983). "Teachers as learners". Archives de Psychologie. 51: 171–175.
Duckworth, E.R. (1987). "Some depths and perplexities of elementary arithmetic". Journal of Mathematical Behavior. 6: 43–94.
Duckworth, E.R. (1990). Opening the world. In E. Duckworth, J. Easley, D. Hawkins & A. Henriques (Eds.), Science education: A minds-on approach for the elementary years (pp.21–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Duckworth, E.R. (1999). "Engaging learners with their own ideas: An interview with Eleanor Duckworth". The Active Learner. 4 (1): 28–30.
Duckworth, E.R. (2001a). Inventing density. In E. Duckworth (ed.), "Tell me more": Listening to learners explain (pp.1–41). New York: Teachers College Press. Original publication 1986.
Duckworth, E.R. (2002). "The having of wonderful ideas" and other essays on teaching and learning. Fieldwork - Notes from expeditionary learning classrooms, X(2), 11–12. Book review
Duckworth, E.R. (2005a). A reality to which each belongs. In B.S. Engel (ed.), Holding values: What we mean by progressive education (pp.142–147). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Duckworth, E.R. (2006). "The having of wonderful ideas" and other essays on teaching and learning. Third edition. New York: Teachers College Press.
Duckworth, E.R. (2008). Teaching as research. In A. Miletta & M. Miletta (eds), Classroom conversations. A collection of classics for parents and teachers (pp.119–144). New York: The New Press.
Duckworth, E.R. & Julyan, C. (2005). A constructivist perspective on teaching and learning science. In C.T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (pp.61–79). 2nd edition. New York: Teachers College Press.
Duckworth, E.R., Easley, J., Hawkins, D. & Henriques, A. (Eds.) (1990). Science education: A minds-on approach for the elementary years. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
↑ "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).
↑ 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).
↑ 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).
Bobilya, A.J. & Daniel, B. (2009). Eleanor Duckworth: The teacher's teacher. In T. Smith & C.E. Knapp (eds), Beyond Dewey and Hahn: Foundations for experiential education, Vol I (pp.113–122). Lake Geneva, WI: Raccoon Institute.
Cavicchi, E.M. (1999). Experimenting with wires, batteries, bulbs, and the induction coil: Narratives of teaching and learning physics in the electrical investigations of Laura, David, Jamie, myself and the nineteenth century experiments - our developments and instruments. Thesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Dorn, M.S. (1979). An example for us all. Learning with Breadth and Depth, by Eleanor Duckworth, ed. R. Dropkin, Workshop Center for Open Education, New York.
Elementary Science Study (ESS) (1970). Elementary science study reader. Newton, MA: Education Development Center, Inc.
Pettigrew, N.G. (Spring 2007). The art of listening. The Exeter Bulletin, 42–45.
Ripple, R.E. & Rockcastle, V.N. (Eds.) (1964). Piaget rediscovered. A report of the conference on cognitive studies and curriculum development. Cornell University: School of Education.
Shorr, W. (2007). "Educating for peace with critical exploration". Harvard Educational Review. 77 (3): 369–374. doi:10.17763/haer.77.3.g110618k94m67j60.
Zeichner, K.M. (1992). Conceptions of reflective teaching in contemporary U.S. teacher education program reforms. In L. Valli (Ed.), Reflective teacher education - cases and critiques (pp. 161–173). Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
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