Zirbes, Laura

The contributions of Laura Zirbes (18841967) to the field of curriculum lie in three areas: (1) as a consummate progressive teacher and teacher educator; (2) as an early advocate of classroom-based, teacher-initiated research; and (3) as a steadfast leader in professional organizations dedicated to the improvement of educational practice. In 1948, the National Women's Press Club recognized her achievements in education with an award as “Woman of the Year,” presented to her by President Harry Truman. With more than 200 publications, hundreds of speeches and workshops for inservice educators, and a career of more than 60 years teaching at all levels of schooling, she advocated an elementary curriculum that recognized the developmental needs of the child, the centrality of experience in learning, the integration of content areas, and the role of creativity for achieving human potential.

Zirbes began teaching 4th grade in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1903. Immediately, she challenged lock-step, recitation methods in favor of approaches that considered children as individuals with unique backgrounds and needs. An early article on experimentation in her own classroom led to a position at the Lincoln School at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she also earned bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees. In 1928, she relocated to The Ohio State University where she taught until her retirement in 1954. In her later years, she continued teaching at many universities and offering workshops and institutes for teachers.

Her position at the Lincoln School as investigator in reading enabled her to explore the impact of individualized instructional methods on reading and to challenge the use of basal readers and standardized tests. In these efforts, Zirbes demonstrated an inquiring mind, open to questioning and observing teaching practices. She also participated in the development of the school's principles of child-centeredness, an integration of subject areas, and a valuing of the arts.

At Ohio State, she expanded these views in summer demonstration schools and in work within a local public school and in a private building she financed herself; these efforts led to the establishment of the elementary school within the College of Education's University School. As director of research in the University School, she championed a pragmatic progressivism designed to encourage teachers' thinking as they put progressive theories into practice. For more than 35 years, teachers and students preparing to teach visited the university school and participated in intensive workshops to see progressive practices in action and to observe how teachers collaborated around key principles.

Zirbes participated actively in the work of the school's elementary teachers through informal influence that stressed developmentalism, the role of firsthand experience in learning, the integration of subject areas, the centrality of democratic values, and the need for cooperation rather than competition in children's work. She also recognized [Page 952]that structure was still necessary to foster healthy learning. In so doing, Zirbes avoided either-or thinking, an approach that enabled the application of these practices in a wide variety of public school settings. Her work thus presaged movements in elementary curriculum during the late 1960s and the early 1970s based on the British Infant School model and the whole language movement of the 1990s.

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