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John G. Nicholls (1940-1994)
The ideas and work of John G. Nicholls in areas of development, motivation, curriculum, teacher education, and democratic education have influenced - and continue to influence - many educators, teachers, students, and researchers.
John's incredible work journey began in New Zealand, where he gained a Master's in Psychology and Education and lectured at Victoria University in Wellington. It was here that John became fascinated by the idea of creativity in others, and began to explore intentions central to motivation. "As John worked, he began to suspect that children might not think about the meaning of various attributions in the same way as adults, and that this had interesting implications for the use of attribution theory to explain children's motivation. While still in New Zealand John began to investigate the development of children's conceptions of effort, ability, and task difficulty. These investigations continued as he moved first to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and then to Purdue University. "...During the 1980s, John's ideas about intentionality and goals, the development of conceptions of ability, effort, and task difficulty, and the purposes of schooling came together in his intentional theory of motivation, described in his 1989 book from Harvard University Press. "...In John's further explorations, he considered the meaning of task involvement from multiple perspectives and in various contexts. This included work in motivation and sport, the nature of task involvement in different school subjects, and the relationship between task involvement and the role of students in the classroom. These studies formed a part of his focus on students and teachers as educational theorists and rational critics, a focus that was increasingly important to John until his death." John had a passion for democratic education and for making schools better places for developing children. "The route to this kind of school improvement, in John's view, was through involving students in determining their own education, and in taking students' and teachers' views as seriously as those of other educational theorists." Quotes from A Memorial Tribute to the Work of John G. Nicholls by Susan Nolen, University of Washington
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Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself." - John Dewey
