Welcome. We're here to celebrate the life and work of our friend and colleague, John G. Nicholls. John died on September 29, 1994, of primary sclerosing cholangitis, a heriditary disease of the bile ducts. He was 54 years old.
Although his career was cut short, John's ideas and work influenced many people, teachers, students, and researchers in a wide variety of disciplines. Today you will have an opportunity to talk about interactions with John and his ideas in areas of development, motivation, curriculum, teacher education, and democratic education. After some introductory remarks, we'll be breaking into groups to do what John did throughout his career: Have conversations about controversial ideas.
But before we begin, I'd like to make a couple of brief announcements. After John's death in September of 1994, we established a trust fund in his name to support innovative research in motivation. We are happy to announce that the Trust will soon be taking applications for its first small grants award. We will be announcing the request for proposals in various newsletters in the next month or two, and we will also be establishing a web page with information about submitting proposals. You may also write to Carolyn Jagacinski at Purdue University for information. The deadline for proposals will be December 1.
If you would like to contribute to the Nicholls Trust, you can send tax-deductible donations to the John G. Nicholls Trust in care of:
The John G. Nicholls Trust
The Seattle Foundation
425 Pike Street, Suite 510
Seattle, WA 98101-2334
I would like to begin the session by giving a brief overview of John's career. Born January 27, 1940 in Wanganui, New Zealand. John earned his BA in Psychology and Education from the University of New Zealand in 1963, and his diploma in teaching at Wellington Teachers College in 1965. He began his teaching career that same year, teaching grades 6 and 7.
John earned a Masters and Ph.D. in Education & Psychology from Victoria University of Wellington, finishing in 1972. John was a Lecturer at Victoria University until 1977. Throughout his life, John pursued ideas that were personally meaningful. A very orderly person himself, he was fascinated by the idea of creativity in others. His early work focused on creativity in both children and adults. In 1972 he had an article in American Psychologist called Creativity in the Person Who Will Never Produce Anything Original and Useful: The Concept of Creativity as a Normally Distributed Trait.
John's work on creativity led him to begin thinking about the role of attributions. Attribution theory appealed to John's sense of orderliness and logic, as well as his notion that intentions were central to motivation. He began to explore motivation from this perspective, publishing articles in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology, among others.
As John worked, he began to suspect that children might not think about the meaning of various attributions in the same way as adults, and that this had interesting implications for the use of attribution theory to explain children's motivation. While still in New Zealand John began to investigate the development of children's conceptions of effort, ability, and task difficulty. These investigations continued as he moved first to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then to Purdue University. John's work on children's conceptions appeared in Journal of Educational Psychology, Child Development, as well as in edited books. During the 1980s, John's ideas about intentionality and goals, the development of conceptions of ability, effort, and task difficulty, and the purposes of schooling came together in his intentional theory of motivation, described in his 1989 book from Harvard University Press (which is unfortunately about to go out of print).
In his further explorations, John considered the meaning of task involvement from multiple perspectives and and in various contexts. This included work in motivation and sport, the nature of task involvement in different school subjects, and the relationship between task involvement and the role of students in the classroom. These studies formed a part of his focus on students and teachers as educational theorists and rational critics, a focus that was increasingly important to John until his death.
In the 1990s, while at the University of Illinois at Chicago, John turned to issues of curriculum, and of the place of students and teachers in negotiating that curriculum. The roots of this interest can be traced back through his work on students' conceptions and his continuing interest in the voices of those not in power. In addition to various articles and chapters, two books, Education as Adventure: Lessons from the Second Grade with Susan Hazzard, and Reasons for Learning: Expanding the Conversation on Student-Teacher Collaboration, edited with Terri Thorkildsen, document John's passion for this kind of democratic education, and for making schools better places for developing children. The route to this kind of school improvement, in John's view, was through involving students in determining their own education, and in taking students' and teachers' views as seriously as those of other educational theorists.
Throughout his life John touched and was touched by the people with whom he worked. It was through conversation that many of his ideas took root and grew, and I can think of no better way to pay tribute to John than by having conversations about his work and how it touched our own. If these conversations spark new ideas and take us in new directions, I think John would be most pleased.