Colleagues,
Please join me in congratulating Penney Clark and Stephen Petrina who (with Mona Gleason of EDST) have been awarded the 2012 Founders’ Prize by the Canadian History of Education Association. Their award winning article, Clark, P., Gleason, M., & Petrina, S. (2012) “Preschools for science: The Child Study Centre at the University of British Columbia, 1960-1997,” can be found in the History of Education Quarterly, 52 (1), 29-61.
The development of the Child Study Centre (CSC) at UBC provides a unique perspective on the complex and often contradictory relationship between child study and preschool education in postwar Canada. In this article, we detail the development and eventual closure of the CSC at UBC, focusing on the uneasy interdependencies of scientific child study research and the education of preschoolers. Similar to laboratory schools on Canadian campuses, the CSC was a strange hybrid of school and clinic, educational classroom and psychological lab, a place intended to cultivate both cutting edge research and children’s imaginations.
Hearty congratulations, Penney and Stephen on this wonderful achievement!
Best, Peter
Peter Grimmett
Professor and Head, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy