Meisels, Samuel J.

Education and Professional Positions

Samuel Joseph Meisels was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1945, the son of a famous cantor and a musician mother. He received his bachelor's degree with high honors from the University of Rochester, where he studied philosophy, focusing on moral philosophy. Upon graduation from Rochester, he enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard in education and philosophy, which seemed to be a reasonable next step in his education, given Meisels's belief that education was an inherently moral enterprise.

It was as a graduate student at Harvard that Meisels discovered the work of Jean Piaget. He was immediately impressed with Piaget's revolutionary ideas about children and epistemology. In fact, it was this early acquaintance with Piaget's work that motivated Meisels to begin spending time in classrooms in various capacities as a teacher of young children. In his words, it was during this time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that he gave up epistemology (“knowing that”) for curriculum development and intervention (“knowing how”) (Meisels, 2002). At a later point in his career, when he became more engaged in children's assessment, “knowing that” became dominant once more.

Upon completing his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Meisels accepted a position at Tufts University, where he became an assistant professor and the director of the Eliot Pearson Children's School, a university laboratory school, in the department of child study. He was affiliated with Tufts from 1972 to 1980. He spent 1979–1980 as a senior adviser in Early Childhood Development at the Developmental Evaluation Clinic at the Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in the fall of 1980. Meisels was appointed an associate professor in the School of Education and [Page 699]the director of Special Education at the Michigan University Affiliated Facility, known as the Institute for the Study of Mental Retardation and Related Disabilities. During his 21 years at Michigan, he held several positions, including that of research scientist at the Center for Human Growth, professor in the School of Education, and interim dean and associate dean for research in the Education School. He is currently a professor emeritus at Michigan. In 2002, Meisels became the president of Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development located in Chicago.

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