TC Mourns Passing of Griffin and Summerscales | Teachers College Columbia University

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TC Mourns Passing of Griffin and Summerscales

The College lost two of its faculty emeriti - William Summerscales, former Director of Institutional Advancement, and Gary Griffin, former Director of the National Center for Restructuring Schools, Education and Teaching (NCREST) in recent months.
William Summerscales, Professor Emeritus of Education, passed away in February.  He was formerly the Director Of Experimental Lay Studies with the Board Of Education of the United Presbyterian Church and Associate Professor of Education and also served as Teachers College’s first Director of Institutional Development, as well as Director of its Office of Placement. In the former capacity during the 1970s, together with the College’s Alumni Council, Summerscales initiated the Distinguished Alumni Awards Program to broadcast the breadth and variety of careers pursued by TC’s graduates. Summerscales was also the author of Affirmation and Dissent: Columbia’s Response to the Crisis of World War I, published by Teachers College Press in 1970.

Gary A. Griffin, Professor Emeritus of Education and former director of TC’s National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching (NCREST), passed away in early March. Griffin’s focus on child-centered education grew out of the nine years he spent as a teacher and elementary school administrator in the Santa Monica, California, Unified School District from 1956-65. In the early 1980s, as Director of Research in Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin, Griffin conducted some of the largest-scale research yet done on teacher education. He came to Teachers College in 1971 and subsequently served for five years as the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois and another six as Chair of the Department of Teaching and Teaching Education at the University of Arizona, before returning to TC in 1996. He also served as Director of the College’s Division of Instruction. Among his many books and monographs, Griffin was editor of Rethinking Standards through Teacher Preparation Partnerships, (SUNY Press, 2002), which documents six exemplary teacher preparation programs participating in school-university partnerships. He also edited The Education of Teachers, published as the 98th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education.  

Published Tuesday, Apr. 13, 2010

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