Teaching the Teachers

By Greer Bautz

The “eclectic and exciting career” of Constance Counts, C.A.S.’81, Ed.D.’87, has taken her from HGSE’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., to Cambridge, England, where she designed a study-abroad program for adult students, and back again (she now teaches at Lesley University). But her focus, since leaving Appian Way with a doctorate in human development, has remained “teaching the teachers, many of whom are low-income or immigrant adult learners,” specifically preservice teachers to the young and underserved children in urban childcare and early education settings.

Her perspectives as an experienced educator, a mother, and a grandmother have led Counts to invest with the Ed School. “Advocacy and leadership in early childhood education is extremely important to me,” she says. “I am passionate about the low-income and immigrant communities. Many of the early childhood educators in urban environments are part of this community and they need access to higher education and the research that comes out of such environments so that they, and the important young minds they teach, can truly integrate into the mainstream.”

As associate professor of social sciences in the Adult Learning Division at Lesley, she recently codirected a U.S. Department of Education federal grant program with Action for Boston Community Development, Inc. (ABCD), an antipoverty agency, and the Urban College of Boston, in which a group of Boston Head Start teachers earned their bachelor’s degrees.

With her financial gift and membership to the Paul Hanus Society, she is entrusting the Ed School, in conjunction with the university’s Center on the Developing Child, to determine how to meet “moral imperative to provide quality early childcare and education for our nation’s youngest and most vulnerable children.” By promoting work on the developing child, she believes she is giving teachers the tools to “harness the benefits of understanding the developing brain” and to develop a “multicultural approach that affects learning.” The Center on the Developing Child, founded and led by Professor Jack Shonkoff, will focus on advances in the integrated science of health, learning, and behavior, and will bring that science to bear on public decision-making affecting the lives of children and the well-being of society.

“There is just so much out there on early childhood education. From everything I’ve seen from the center so far, I feel like its research will have a broad impact. Not only for the children my Boston Head Start teachers connect with each day, but also for my own grandchildren, in their suburban schools out on the West Coast.”

— Greer Bautz is a freelance writer living in Waltham, Mass.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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photo by Ed Malitsky