Teachers College Collective of Curriculum Professors

Teachers College at Columbia University has earned a reputation in the past century as a national leader [Page 871]in curriculum studies. During the early to mid-20th century, the institution resisted forming a dominant philosophic orientation or preferred epistemology. Widely recognized for its promotion of variations of progressive (experimentalist) education, fostered by the contributions of John Dewey, faculty members at Teachers College simultaneously advanced the “scientific” approaches to education advanced by E. L. Thorndike as well as the essentialist platform of W. C. Bagley and I. L. Kandel. The use of laboratory schools for experimentation with curriculum and instruction was widely emulated in other teacher preparation programs. By mid-century, Hollis Caswell promoted focus on school reform with the support of Alice Miel and Arthur Wells Foshay, ...