HGSE Remembers Courtney Cazden

The Harvard Graduate School of Education is mourning the loss of Courtney Cazden, a scholar whose work had a profound influence on the study of children’s language development, classroom discourse, literacy, and multilingualism.

Cazden died on December 25, 2025, having turned 100 a month earlier. Having graduated with her Ed.D. from HGSE in 1965, Cazden began teaching at the Ed School shortly thereafter, eventually being named the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education. She was named professor of education, emerita, upon her retirement in 1996.

“Courtney’s scholarship profoundly shaped the study of children’s language development, classroom discourse, literacy, and multilingualism. She was a deeply respected and much-loved member of the HGSE faculty for more than three decades,” wrote Dean Nonie Lesaux, reflecting a tradition of literacy scholarship at HGSE that Cazden was instrumental in defining. “Courtney exemplified HGSE’s values of rigorous scholarship, public purpose, and care for all children, and she will be deeply missed.”

Cazden was born in Chicago on November 30, 1925. In an oral history interview with the University of Toronto in 2004, Cazden described an upper middle class upbringing in the Midwest, and spending winters on a Mississippi cotton plantation while her father played polo and hunted birds. At 13, Cazden moved to Maine with an aunt and attended private school there. She skipped the 10th grade, and at just 16 she attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, “poorly prepared and emotionally underdeveloped.”

“I was not prepared to take advantage of Harvard,” she recalled about her early years in Cambridge. In time, though, Cazden became an essential player in the school’s history and a force in the study of early language development. She earned her A.B. in philosophy from Radcliffe in 1946. While at Harvard, Cazden also met her husband, Norman Cazden, a music professor, who died in 1980.

A seminal educational experience Cazden recalled was summers at Camp Woodland, a summer camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York State where she worked as a counselor during the 1940s. Cazden described her first summer at the camp as “a wonderful experience” which sparked her educational curiosity and love of teaching.

Cazden would earn her master’s in elementary education from the University of Illinois in 1953 and spent her early career teaching primary school in Connecticut. When she returned to Cambridge in 1961, Cazden was encouraged to continue her education at Harvard, and she found a welcome academic atmosphere ready for her scholarship.

“Early to mid sixties was a fantastic time to be in Cambridge,” Cazden recalled. “I don’t know of any intellectually more exciting place at that moment because there were these revolutions, paradigm shifts writ-large going on in both psychology and linguistics.”

Cazden’s dissertation at HGSE was an experimental study of the effects of expansions on children’s language development. She then worked at the Harvard Department of Psychology and Social Relations with pioneering researchers Roger Brown and John Carrol. A groundbreaking study of early language development of “Adam, Eve, and Sarah” followed. Cazden urged researchers to include Sarah, who was from a working-class background, which allowed for the study of a universal pattern of language development across social class.  

Cazden was named professor of education at HGSE in 1971, but her ties to early education remained strong. In 1974-75, she worked as a full-time primary grades teacher in San Diego, which sparked an interest in further researching classroom talk. Her first book, Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning, was published in 1988 and was one of the first works to establish classroom talk as central to learning and a mechanism to reduce or exacerbate inequities in opportunities to learn.

A champion of multicultural and multilingual education, Cazden earned an honorary degree from Bank Street College of Education in 1986, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1987 to travel to New Zealand for research. A member of the Reading Hall of Fame, she was also named a member of the National Academy of Education in 1990. 

An integral part of HGSE’s storied affiliation with Sesame Street, Cazden was among the faculty that helped develop the show’s curriculum and took on advisory roles at Sesame Workshop.  

At a 2019 event honoring the show’s 50th anniversary, Cazden noted how thrilled she was to be included in conversations about the show’s creation, working with producers to find the right syntax and vocabulary level to reach 3- to 5-year-olds across all races and backgrounds.

“I as a researcher got the chance to talk to television producers who otherwise, I dare say, would never speak with me,” she said, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Cazden also worked on The Electric Company, a PBS show which ran from 1971 to 1977 and aimed to introduce reading to 7- to 10-year-olds. In the 1980s, that work was cited by Harvard School of Education Dean Patricia Albjerg Graham as a foundation of the school developing a technology and education program.

Cazden’s impact on HGSE spanned far beyond her own teaching and research. Her mentorship of countless students over the decades ushered in new generations of teachers and thinkers who continue to develop the educational landscape, including prominent HGSE alums Lisa Delpit, Michelle Foster, and Vanessa Siddle Walker.

“Courtney’s first commitment had been to improving the quality of elementary education in public schools,” says Professor Catherine Snow, a longtime colleague of Cazden’s. “Courtney taught generations of HGSE students about child language, classroom language, literacy development, and multilingualism.”

“Courtney was my first writing mentor in graduate school; she invited me to co-author a chapter on classroom discourse,” said Sarah Beck, Ed.D.‘02, professor of English education at New York University. “I will always be grateful to her for that opportunity and for how, as a scholar, she modeled such deep respect for teachers and their students.”

Terry Tivnan, who spent nearly three decades as an Ed School lecturer, recalled Cazden encouraging him to teach a course on research methods in 1980 that led to a career at HGSE as a student and faculty at that spanned more than five decades.

“I was worried that teaching a course might delay progress toward my own graduation, but Professor Courtney Cazden carefully pointed out to me that this was a special opportunity and I would be wise to accept,” he wrote in Ed. Magazine. “I am glad I listened to her advice.”