Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, the namesake and founding group member of the Edmund W. Gordon Brooklyn Laboratory Charter School, has served numerous roles more than the training course of his 80-calendar year occupation: psychologist, thinker, educator, social scientist, civil legal rights leader, public servant, author, mentor, and minister. He’s also been a husband, father, grandfather, and wonderful-grandfather.
On the occasion of Dr. Gordon’s 101st birthday, we proceed to honor his singularly broad and deep influence on education and learning and civil legal rights. As a founding father of Brooklyn Lab, Dr. Gordon served our university convey his tips about fairness and justice in training to life. He has deep thumbprints on everything we do as a understanding group, and Dr. Gordon’s mentorship and instructional principles have formed Brooklyn LAB practitioners’ solution to their get the job done and how we implement our Critical Design Factors.
But his affect in instruction has extended much outside of our university. Like his mentors, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alaine Locke, Dr. Gordon is a single of America’s most distinguished general public intellectuals, a champion for equity in an period of inequality. Dr. Gordon has influenced hundreds of hundreds of instructors, school leaders, educational scientists, and policymakers, revolutionizing how educators train and how educational facilities produce the efficient and just academic ordeals every single pupil warrants.
A person of Dr. Gordon’s most important areas of concentration has been on the positive progress of underserved small children of coloration. He has spent a long time analyzing the point out of education and learning in The usa, and in which it’s slipping brief, creating theories and frameworks that have made pedagogy and curriculum much more responsive to the wants of college students from all walks of daily life.
Many thanks to Dr. Gordon, we now have a general public instruction program that acknowledges the strengths of just about every neighborhood and family members, and attempts to harness those property to meet learners wherever they are and establish their strengths.
An Exhibit Celebrating the Legacy of a Residing Legend
Dr. Gordon’s work is as relevant today as it was when he started out his job in the early 1940s.
As a fruits of our Centennial Celebration, our school community is preparing to share an exhibit to rejoice the legacy of this dwelling legend. As we finalize these elements, we will share them within just our faculty group and further than.
The forthcoming exhibit celebrates Dr. Gordon’s everyday living and do the job: wherever he arrived from, what encouraged him, and the big tips that Dr. Gordon set forth, which go on to condition a vision of American schooling at its best—a just and equitable process that serves the desires of all learners.
The exhibit unpacks the tenets of Gordon’s applied and theoretical investigate about life, schooling, and epistemological thinking—approaches that led to the creation of Head Get started and other social academic applications created to present equivalent access to high-quality instruction.
The coronary heart of this exhibit explains a number of of Dr. Gordon’s crucial education principles, together with: academic resilience, compensatory training, affirmative advancement, supplemental schooling, intellective competence, and evaluation for finding out. These approaches will affect educators for generations to arrive. We also share case scientific tests from Brooklyn Lab and throughout New York City—real examples of how our university has grow to be a dwelling laboratory celebrating, building on, and honoring Gordon’s impactful get the job done.
Dr. Gordon’s tips have impressed our journey, and we hope they encourage yours.