Patricia cooper vivian paley biography

Share or Implant Document

Copyright:

Available Formats

American teacher and researcher (1929–2019)

Vivian Gussin Paley (January 25, 1929 – July 26, 2019) was an American pre-school and kindergarten teacher and early childhood education researcher. She taught and did most of her research at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, as well as the author of numerous books.

Early career

Vivan Paley was born in Chicago, Illinois. After receiving her Ph.B. from the University of Chicago in 1947,^[1] and a B.A. in Psychology from Newcomb College in 1950,^[2] she began her teaching career in New Orleans in the 1950s, and later in Great Neck, New York. It was during her time teaching in New Orleans that she began to reflect on some of the ways in which childhood learning at the time was being choked by an overemphasis on strict learning boundaries (e.g., that children could only be allowed to learn how to write in capital letters, not lower-case) and perfunctory memorization.

While teaching in Great Neck, she began to reflect on how play can be the "most usable context" for interaction and intellectual growth among kindergartners. This view, however, flew in the face of what many early education teachers thought at the time, that with the

•