In the seminal paper cowritten with George Franz, The Computer As Material – Messing About with Time, Seymour Papert shares his admiration for a David Hawkins essay, Messing About with Science. Papert cites the Hawkins piece as inspiration for his own.
At Constructing Modern Knowledge one year, I shared lunch with several of my (s)heroes, Deborah Meier, Cynthia Solomon, and Reggio Emilia approach expert, Lella Gandini. Perhaps looking for common ground, they spontaneously engaged in conversation about David Hawkins. He also had a big impact on Eleanor Duckworth and the pioneers in Reggio Emilia, including Loris Malaguzzi and Carla Rinaldi.
Isn’t it peculiar that such an influencer of progressive education giants is known to so few educators today?
Here is the original Hawkins 1965 article, Messing About in Science.
Resources:
- Hawkins Centers of Learning
- The Seymour Papert written and multimedia archives at Dailypapert.com
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.