Education Pioneer Ann Brown Dies at 55

Ann Brown, the Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, died at the age of 55 at UCSF Hospital on June 4, 1999. From a childhood in a working class English family where no one had finished high school, Professor Brown became a seminal figure in educational theory and practice, serving as President of the American Educational Research Association from 1993-94 and of the National Academy of Education (1997-98). Howard Gardner has said of her work that she has had "more impact than any other psychologist of her time." She is renowned for her vision of the classroom as a community of learners, where students actively engage in framing and solving problems, just as researchers do.

Ann Brown was born to an Irish mother and English father in an air raid shelter in Portsmouth, England in 1943. Dyslexic, she did not learn to read until the age of 13. She failed the high-stakes exam that led to the college-bound track in English state-run schools, and attended parochial schools instead. She became interested in psychology at age 18 when she was applying for a scholarship to the University of London.

After obtaining a Ph.D. in psychology in 1967 and a teaching appointment at the University of Sussex, Ann Brown came to work in the United States in 1968, and two years later she met Joseph C. Campione, her future husband and collaborator, now on the Graduate School of Education faculty.

Her years of apprenticeship in laboratory experimentation on animals led Ann Brown to conclude that more could be learned about education from observing children in actual classrooms. In schools, she noticed that children who had difficulty learning by rote or mechanical reading were far more successful working together in groups to define and discuss problems. From this work she developed with collaborator Annemarie Palincsar her theory of Reciprocal Teaching.

She joined the faculty at UCB's Graduate School of Education in 1988. While at Berkeley, she began the Community of Learners project at John Swett Elementary School in Oakland to test in an inner-city context her new approach to classrooms. The students responded amazingly well to her idea of having them act as teams of reseachers who frame questions and seek answers. In one year, for instance, a class of second graders in the project saw their reading scores leap 34 months, with half the class then reading at 5th grade level or above according to standardized tests.

Summing up her contribution to the field, GSE Professor Alan Schoenfeld commented, "Ann Brown was a brilliant scholar whose scholarship and service contributed in numerous ways to the improvement of education. At every point in her career, from her early days as a psychologist to her recent work conducting 'design experiments' in schools, she pioneered new methods for exploring educational phenomena. Her work on numerous policy boards, for the National Academy of Education, the U. S. Department of Education, and the National Research Council, helped set directions for education policy in the United States. Her service as president of the American Educational Research Association and her role chairing selection committees for prestigious postdoctoral fellowships helped to build the instrastructure for educational research. And, her work on Fostering Communities of Learners in local schools and nationally will result in the significant improvement of educational practice. We are much poorer for her absence, but we are much richer for her legacy of significant theory and applications to the practice of education."

Ann Brown