Photo by Chris Meyer
 “Jerry’s scholarship on teaching has helped to constitute, if not to define, the contemporary knowledge base for teaching English and language arts.” —Mary Beth Hines, chair of the Department of Language Education, School of Education, IU Bloomington |
Some of the projects completed by Jerome Harste’s students may seem, on the surface, to have little relationship to language education. At times they are asked, for example, to draw in sketchbooks, paint with watercolors, make collages or familiarize themselves with popular video games. Yet the insights that these prospective teachers gain from Harste’s eclectic assignments enable them to approach English and language arts instruction in revolutionary new ways.
Harste has been at the forefront of a movement away from a drill-and-skill method of teaching these subjects and toward the philosophy of whole language, which emphasizes integration of all language skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). His work recognizes that children learn language through interaction with everything and everyone around them.
In 1994, Harste led a group of teachers in opening the Center for Inquiry, an innovative urban school within the Indianapolis Public Schools system. With a curriculum dedicated to holistic, inquiry-based education that allows for multiple ways of learning, the center includes a teacher education component for the preparation of cohorts of future teachers. Although Harste has returned to full-time teaching on the Bloomington campus, he continues to use the center as a platform for his inquiry-oriented research.
Harste’s methods reflect his personal teaching philosophy. “Live the curriculum you teach,” he said. “If we believe in teacher inquiry, then it is important that we be teacher researchers in our classrooms and that students see these demonstrations in our day-to-day interactions.”
That’s why it is so important to Harste that the education majors in his classes spend time on activities like the ones their own students will someday experience—and why a recent, typical assignment challenged them to create artwork in the style of famed children’s book author Eric Carle.
In addition to co-authoring the award-winning Language Stories and Literacy Lessons, with Carolyn Burke and Virginia Woodward, Harste has written and co-authored several works of children’s literature. His book, It Didn’t Frighten Me (co-authored by Janet Goss), has been published in several languages. One of his favorite pieces of fan mail (signed “from Amy & Erin”) said only this, creatively spelled in carefully printed letters: “roses are red,/violets are blue,/your the best auther/I ever new.”
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