Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner was born October 15, 1915 in New York City, the youngest of four children in a "nominally observant" Jewish family. Bruner was educated at Duke University and Harvard (from which he was awarded a PhD in 1947). During World War II, Bruner worked as a social psychologist exploring propaganda public opinion and social attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence. After obtaining his PhD he became a member of faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well as cofounder and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. 
Beginning in the 1940s, Jerome Bruner, along with Leo Postman, worked on the ways in which needs, motivations, and expectations (or 'mental sets') influence perception. Sometimes dubbed as the 'New Look', they explored perception from a functional orientation (as against a process to separate from the world around it). In addition to this work, Bruner began to look at the role of strategies in the process of human categorization, and more generally, the development of human cognition. This concern with cognitive psychology led to a particular interest in the cognitive development of children (and their modes of representation) and just what the appropriate forms of education might be.
From the late 1950s on, Jerome Bruner became interested in schooling in the USA - and was invited to chair an influential ten day meeting of scholars and educators at Woods Hole on Cape Cod in 1959 (under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation). One result was Bruner's landmark book The Process of Education (1960). It developed some of the key themes of that meeting and was a crucial factor in the generation of a range of educational programs and experiments in the 1960s. Jerome Bruner subsequently joined a number of key panels and committees (including the President's Advisory Panel of Education). In 1963, he received the Distinguished Scientific Award from the American Psychological Association, and in 1965 he...