TRIBUTE TO ANN BROWN
January 26, 1943–June 4, 1999
It is hard to imagine that anyone familiar with Ann Brown and her work did not feel an enormous sense of loss on hearing of her death June 4, 1999. Her contributions to educational and psychological research and to scholarship were extraordinary, whether measured by their number, their generativity, or their impact. Perhaps more than most scholars, Ann's work can be characterized as a journey—a journey toward a theoretical model of learning and instruction—a journey in which she integrated and applied her vast knowledge of teaching, learning, curriculum, assessment, and the social contexts of classrooms and schools—a journey always focused on the goal of expanding learners' capabilities.
Ann's life journey began January 26, 1943 in Portsmouth, England. She was the middle child and only daughter of Kathryn and John Lesley Taylor. Her own history as a learner is noteworthy as she experienced considerable difficulty learning to read and did not attain fluency until the age of 13, an accomplishment that she attributed to a teacher who recognized Ann's potential and worked to unleash it. Ann's higher education was completed at the University of London, where, drawn to the study of animal learning, she pursued her degrees in psychology, completing a dissertation study in 1967 entitled, Anxiety and Complex Learning Performance in Children.
Attracted by research in developmental psychology that was taking place in the United States, Ann took a leave from her first academic position at the University of Sussex and accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and an appointment as a research scientist at the Children's Research Center at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. In a rare turn in academia, but in a move that signaled Ann's talent, she was awarded tenure at the University of Sussex while in absentia!
As a postdoctoral fellow with Zeaman and House at the University of Connecticut, Ann began a long and productive program of research on human memory. It was in this early work that an attribute strongly identified with Ann's research emerged; that is, her interest in enhancing cognitive performance. In her foundational scholarship in metacognition, she asked about the value of strategies to support knowledge about and control of learning activity. Initially, she raised these questions while studying the learning and achievement of students with mental retardation while engaged in simple recall and recognition tasks; over time, she asked these questions in the context of more challenging tasks, such as the comprehension and use of complex text.
In 1969, Ann met Joseph C. Campione, who became her dearest companion, husband, and closest collaborator. Together, Ann and Joe, leading various teams of researchers, conducted research that reverberated throughout the worlds of educational research and practice in a number of ways. For example, their work in metacognition spurred the development of a new strand of curriculum and instruction that focused on strategy instruction for the purpose of enhancing learners' abilities and the inclination to engage in self-regulation. Their research in strategy instruction led to an examination of fundamental issues regarding the difference between “blind training” and “informed instruction”; and their work on dynamic assessment demonstrated how dormant skills could be awakened with the assistance of others.
Had Ann's career contributions ended here, she would have left an indelible mark on educational research and practice; but they did not end here. In the last decade of her research with Joe, while at the University of California, Berkeley, she launched a new program of inquiry, Fostering Communities of Learners, that had an amazing synthetic quality both in substance and form. The substance included the use of a diverse array of participant structures in which students—engaged as collaborative researchers—pursued deep understanding of content knowledge and domain-specific reasoning in the biological sciences. Working closely with educators in urban schools, Ann and Joe reconceptualized classrooms as contexts in which diversity was not only tolerated but was, in fact, integral to success. This research has taken the form of design experiments in which first principles guide the engineering and investigation of educational innovation. Although these contributions were of significant value to advancing educational practice, they were all the more valuable for the ways in which they advanced learning theory, for these are the kinds of studies that put flesh on abstract notions such as “constructivist pedagogy” and “socially mediated learning.”
Ann's gifts were many and she gave of them generously. She served on the most prestigious boards and panels in our profession. The youngest scholar ever elected to the National Academy of Education, she was its president from 1997 until her death. She served as president of AERA and president of Division 7 of the American Psychological Association. She contributed tirelessly to the writing and dissemination of reports that would spur reform efforts and garner additional attention to and support for educational research; the most recent example being the report of the National Research Council, How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (coedited with Bransford and Cocking in 1999).
Chief among Ann's gifts was her ability to write. The clarity of Ann's writing reflected the fact that she wrote as much from her heart as from her intellect. For example, the children about whom Ann wrote were not just the subjects of her research; thoughts of these children flooded her mind at night; fears of what they would confront as they matriculated to middle school—questions about the possible futures of these children who lived in poverty. When Ann wrote, “what most recent developmental theories ask of teachers is so hard,” it was because she came to a deep respect and appreciation for the work of teachers and the challenging sociopolitical contexts in which they do this work. Ann derived enormous satisfaction from her conversations with the children in her research and glowed as she recounted tales of their accomplishments, filing stories away to enliven future presentations and writing.
Ann was a generous teacher and mentor. To this I can attest personally. As I completed my dissertation study on reciprocal teaching, many was the morning that she met me at her door as the sun was rising, with thoughtful feedback and an encouraging smile that would carry me through the next revision. What I came to understand later is that she had probably retired only several hours before my tentative knocks at her door. Her support did not stop with the awarding of a degree; she was a very dear and steadfast friend.
In recognition of her seminal work in metacognition, her outstanding theoretical and practical contributions to the design of interactive learning environments, her contributions to the development of reasoning in young children, and for her leadership and inspiration to other researchers and students, Ann received the AERA's Award for Distinguished Contributions to Educational Research in 1991. This award was followed by the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for the Application of Psychology by the American Psychological Association in 1996. Then, in recognition of her “… distinguished achievements in psychological science. For brilliantly combining the fields of developmental psychology, learning theory, and the design of learning environments in a career of theoretical and experimental work and their applications to education” she was honored, in 1997, by the American Psychological Society with the James McKeen Catell Award for Distinguished Achievements.
Ann was a fellow of the American Psychological Society, Society for Experimental Psychologists, Spencer Foundation, Society for Research in Child Development, and the American Psychological Association. In addition, she was twice a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She provided leadership on a number of editorial boards in education and psychology, using her position to build a stronger community of scholars, as well as to translate research into practice by communicating the interests and achievements of that community of scholars to others.
The many responsibilities she shouldered in her professional life were made lighter by the pleasure she found in her friendships and in the care of her family. She loved her son, Richard, and took great joy in his accomplishments and in the fact that he married a young woman of Ann's Irish heritage, named Mary. She loved her granddaughter, Sophie, and gathered observations that vied with Piaget's for their specificity and perspicacity; furthermore, she expressed unabashed pride at Sophie's precocious nature. The love, mutual respect, and support that she and Joe provided one another has few parallels in academia.
Ann's death at the age of 56 clearly brought her journey to a premature end. There is no question, however, that her legacy will endure in the work of so many of us who have inherited the powerful tools that are represented in her ideas, in her methods, and in the challenges she posed to reveal and extend the capabilities of learners. Were Ann in attendance at this symposium, she would have encouraged, as every fine teacher does— further, deeper, keep going …
—Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar University of Michigan