Lucy Sprague Mitchell
(1978-1967)
Closest in kin and spiritual inclination to Margaret Mead. Her work for The New York Bureau of Educational Experiments in 1937 would grow into The Bank Street School and later Bank Street College of Education. The metaphor guiding her life's energies was geography. It was a way of making coherent in theory and practice ways for children to work out basic geographic relationships.
Her "Young Geographers" is one of those books that constitute a canon for progressively teaching and learning in urban settings. It's a coda for teacher education; for the interdisciplinary uses of geography, and for the place of study in the lives of young children.
In many ways she was our first important environmental educator. The Rousseau in her saw education as coinciding with children's natural states: playing and thinking. And that the teaching enterprise was to keep feeding them source material in providing the tools for discovering relations, tools for making their images active.
With Lillian Weber, she took the word interactive and applied it to teaching and learning, envisioning schools as places for thinking and playing, places where habits of mind and work would be developed in classrooms that served as laboratories and studios. This is what Lillian Weber would take and run with and call Open Corridor Schools.