Collaborative Works
Susan Marcus co-authored this book, The Missing Alphabet, with Susie Monday and Cynthia Herbert. They wrote this book about 30 years after Learning about Learning came to an end, and it illuminates LAL’s legacy. The book shows that each child has resources and infinite creative potential, and that we are all mutually dependent. The core beliefs that Marcus, Monday, and Herbert embraced have not changed since their time with LAL.
Click on the book and look inside for the Sensory Alphabet! The Sensory Alphabet was the foundation of a child’s experience at Learning about Learning, and the team that included Susan Marcus were always developing it. They originally called the Sensory Alphabet the Elements of Form, then they called it the Sensory Vocabulary. What name do you prefer?
The New World Kids Program Book, also written well after Learning about Learning’s end, demonstrates the development of LAL’s central ideas and just how original and innovative they were. The book, which Cynthia Herbert wrote, details the theories behind the New World Kids Program, which she co-founded withSusan Marcus. Again, you might recognize that their core beliefs have not changed since LAL: they believe that learning should be learner-centered and focused on the development of individual potential. Also, creativity is basic and the sensory alphabet is a powerful language for learning. This educational approach, created in the 1960s, is still compatible with more modern innovations in education, namely the theories of multiple intelligences and the tenants of differentiated instruction developed in the 1980s.
Click on the book to look through and find the similarities between this book and The Missing Alphabet!
The Teacher’s Workshop is an incomplete book draft that the Learning about Learning team started during the operational period of the foundation. In this book, Marcus and others developed training for teachers in their new education style. This project is something that The Missing Alphabet seems to finish. Look for the “Seeing imaginations at work section.” What similarities do you notice between the two activities?
Can you spot the use of the sensory alphabet in the activity? Which senses are highlighted?
The Learning about Learning team created the Me and My World Investigation Book during the operational period of Learning about Learning. Inside, you will recognize the same sensory alphabet! What is different about this alphabet and the ones utilized in Marcus’s and other’s later books? Why are the earlier books illustrated while the later ones use photography? Click on the book and explore the Sensory Alphabet as it was during Learning about Learning!
The continued prevalence of the sensory alphabet highlights the sustained influence of Learning about Learning and the significant innovation in education that occurred because of Wagner and each co-founder.
