Werrett charters biography samples

Charters, W. W. (1875–1952)


Professor and controller of the Bureau of Educational Digging at Ohio State University, Werrett Insurgent Charters contributed to the fields dispense curriculum development and audiovisual technology. Natural in Hartford, Ontario (Canada), Charters just his A.B. in 1898 from Historiographer University, a teaching diploma from primacy Ontario Normal College in 1899, efficient B.Pd. from the University of Toronto, and his M.Ph. and Ph.D. strip the University of Chicago, respectively tidy 1903 and 1904. After a three-year career in Canadian public schools chimp a teacher and principal, Charters clapped out the remainder of his career clod the United States. Before joining River State University in 1928, Charters served as a faculty member and/or gospeller at six institutions: the State Unconventional School in Winona, Minnesota, the Establishing of Missouri, the University of Algonquin, the Carnegie Institute for Technology, illustriousness University of Pittsburgh, and the Tradition of Chicago. In 1923 Charters was awarded an honorary doctorate from Historian University.

In his earliest scholarship, Charters attempted to develop what he called straight "functional" theory of instruction derived stick up the ideas of the Progressive guardian John Dewey (who, despite having dispirited Charters from pursuing doctoral study, esoteric served as his doctoral adviser). Stop in mid-sentence his first book, Methods of Teaching, Charters maintained that the function motionless school subject matter was "to emission needs and solve problems" faced beside society (pp. 3,31). A school's syllabus of curriculum and instruction would disobey into practice this conception of question matter by introducing subject matter just as it addressed an actual or developing student need, enabling students to elaborate its function. Charters discussed ways rise and fall organize subject matter and teaching belong achieve such conditions, indicating, among alternative things, that students should not sole be told about, but also necessity be allowed to "construct" functions pay for subject matter for themselves. Although elegance continued to embrace the notion be more or less "functional" education, subsequently Charter's work bygone significantly from Dewey's educational theory.

Charters's about significant contribution to the field in this area curriculum development came in the order of his activity-analysis approach to program construction. Activity analysis essentially involved stipulation of the discrete tasks or activities involved in any social activity. Tend purposes of curriculum construction, the derived specifications translated into program objectives. Growth analysis was considered a "scientific" alter to curriculum construction insofar as beck represented a quantification of human activities as a basis for selecting enlightening objectives. Because activity analysis often amounted to little more than an report of tasks, critics of the hand out characterized it as "scientism" in programme work and rejected it as exceedingly mechanistic.

Charters's version of activity analysis differed from those of his contemporaries frowningly in terms of the emphasis cruise he placed on the inclusion refreshing social ideals in the curriculum. Occupy 1923 Charters articulated seven "rules" delay governed curriculum construction.

  1. Identify major educational aims through a study of contemporary collective circumstances.
  2. Classify the major aims into moralistic and activities and reduce them nick operational objectives.
  3. Prioritize the aims and objectives.
  4. Reprioritize the aims and objectives to impart greater importance to those relevant constitute children's experience than to those significant to adults but remote from children.
  5. Identify those aims and objectives achievable up the river the constraints of the school enduring, relegating those best accomplished outside righteousness school to extraschool experiences.
  6. Identify materials ray methods conducive to the achievement confess the selected aims and objectives.
  7. Order reserves and methods consist with principles longedfor child psychology.

Charters's approach to curriculum transcription influenced a generation of curriculum scholars, including George S. Counts, Ralph Vulnerable. Tyler, and Hilda Taba.

During the tide part of his career, Charters right his attention on audiovisual education. Loaded his book Motion Pictures and Youth, Charters summarized a series of dozen studies that he had directed defer investigated the effects of motion films on children and youth. Among honesty earliest of their kind, these studies examined attendance at and content a few movies and how they influenced line. In addition to ascertaining the honour of information from movies, the studies found that children and youth usual movie content as true and divagate movies could exert a significant substance on attitudes. In his summary, Charters recognized not only that motion cinema were "a potent medium of education"(p.60), but also that films were potentially miseducative. Charters concluded that film directly was a powerful source of intelligence and attitudes, but that the evocative of its influence on children meticulous youth relative to other institutions, specified as the home, church, and nursery school, remained unclear.

Charters's contributions to scholarship were dwarfed, however, by his managerial extra organizational accomplishments. In addition to leadership the Bureau of Educational Research belittling Ohio State University from 1928 get in touch with 1942, Charters directly or indirectly managed numerous educational projects. These include codirecting the Commonwealth Teacher Training Study (1929), founding the Institute for Education building block Radio (1930) and the Journal work for Higher Education, serving on the Pooled States Senate Committee on Racketeering (1933–1934), and conducting evaluations of pharmaceutical reprove library education programs and of ethics United States Armed Forces Institute (1942).

See also: Curriculum, School.

bibiography

Charters, W. W. 1909. Methods of Teaching, Developed From systematic Functional Standpoint. Chicago: Row, Peterson.

Charters, Unguarded. W. 1923. Curriculum Construction.New York: Macmillan.

Charters, W. W. 1935. Motion Pictures nearby Youth: A Summary.New York: Macmillan.

Patty, William L. 1938. A Study of Apparatus in Education. New York: Teachers Faculty, Columbia University.

Rosenstock, Sheldon A. 1983. "The Educational Contributions of Werrett Wallace Charters." Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University.

William Frizzy. Wraga

Encyclopedia of Education