-Jerome Bruner
The Culture of Education

Learning Theory - Narrative centered cultural interaction. Neutral interactive transactional selves.

Currently, Bruner is an adjunct professor, research professor of psychology, and Meyer Visiting Professor at NYU. Bruner went to NYU’s law school to collaborate with Tony Amsterdam, Peggy Davis, and David Richards in founding and teaching the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal practice. This project is an effort to learn how law is practiced and how its practice can be further understood using tools developed in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary theory.

Bruner began his career as a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, then went to Oxford where he was a Watts Professor. Since the 1960s he has been one of the primary players in the Cognitive Revolution. According to British director, Bruner rehabilitated “a dirty four-letter-word, mind.”

Bruner is of course best known for his work in the educational reform movement of the 1906s, which he helped start. his book, The Process of Education, 1961, was, and still is, a major element of this movement.

Bruner is still an active writer and his books continue to win acclaim. In 1997, his book, The Culture of Education won the American Psychological Association's Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology. In this book, Bruner proposes that “the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse” (Online).

In 1987 Bruner was awarded the International Balzan Prize for his "lifelong contribution to the understanding of the human mind." In addition he has been awarded the CIBA Gold Metal for Distinguished Research, and the Distinguished Award of the American Psychological Association.

On a note closer to home, Bruner developed "Man: A Course of Study, which has become a part of the Culture and Technology CD-Rom for social studies teachers. Culture and Technology, a set of CDs developed at the University of Florida is one of the only places to obtain MACOS resources.