Thinking for Change
A resource center for critical and creative thinking and reflective practice (Home page)

"working to develop people's capacity to make a difference in schools, workplaces, communities, and organizations for social change"

Notes on Founding Associates

Bradford
Greenwald
Millman
Taylor

Allyn Bradford (M. Div, Yale) has a strong background in organizational and human resource development. A Congregational Minister for 12 years, he worked at Synectics Inc. for 6, and then became an Independent Consultant and Trainer. In addition, he is currently teaching at both the college and graduate levels, using a highly innovative approach which makes extensive use of group process and action learning.
Among the education centers where he has designed and conducted training are the American Management Association, the American Society of Training Directors, the Association of Field Service Managers, the Mecuri Institute in Sweden and the Accelerated Management Institute in England.
In the private sector he has designed and conducted training for such companies as Block Drug, General Foods, Avon Products, Honeywell, Digital, Stop & Shop, Johnson & Johnson, Warner Lambert, Monsanto, New England Electric, Telex, Fidelity Trust, Kodak, New England Nuclear, Burger King, FW Faxon, Becton Dickenson, Semicon, The First Years and Matritech.
In the public sector he has designed and conducted training for the Personnel Commission of the State of Idaho, the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission, the Office of Personnel Services of the United Nations, the Boston Neighborhood Development and Employment Agency, and Massachusetts Half-Way Houses, Inc.
Publications: He is the author of "Freedom of Information Changes the Rules" published in the Journal of Management Consulting,"Team Communications" in the Honeywell USMG Mgr. "Suspending Judgement: How to Build Teams Through Critical and Creative Thinking" in The New England Non-Profit Quarterly Journal, "Modern Art and Modern Organizations" in Context, an on-line publication and co-author of Transactional Awareness, a book published by Addison-Wesley.
Allyn teaches Leadership and Management and Effective Team Building at Wentworth Institute of Technology and Dialogue at U-Mass, Boston and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

Nina L. Greenwald (Ph.D., Boston College) is an educational psychologist with over 30 years of teaching experience from elementary through special (M.Ed., Special Education) and graduate education. Her specializations include: staff and curriculum development for teaching thinking, creative problem solving, problem-based learning; gifted education and teaching to multiple intelligences.
A national teacher trainer, keynote speaker and business consultant, Nina is the author of articles on teaching thinking and problem-based learning (PBL), teaching gifted children, and teaching thinking through multiple intelligences. She has written major thinking-based curricula for The National Institute of Health, The American Medical Association, the Massachusetts Society for Medical Research, The New England Aquarium, and NOVA. In Spring 2000, a new book being released by Allyn and Bacon contains an article she has co-authored on teaching for creativity. Her current book, on problem-based learning (PBL) in science for secondary students, features interviews with leading biomedical scientists and a PBL model for guiding students in the use of this material. Beginning in Spring 2000, The Pennsylvania State Department of Education, in collaboration with The Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research will utilize this book as a basis for promoting instructional reforms in science education.
A faculty member in the Graduate Program of Critical and Creative Thinking at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Nina teaches the core courses in creative thinking and critical thinking, has taught several other major courses in the program and introduced courses on humor and thinking. For ten years she was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology, Boston College and in 1992, elected to the Danforth Associates of New England, an organization of selected higher education faculty distinguished for excellence in teaching.
Nina is former director of Critical and Creative Thinking programs for a Massachusetts educational collaborative, and advisor for the Museum of Science, Boston, on the development of innovative exhibits that engage visitors in thinking and problem solving. She is a founding member and two-term past president of The Massachusetts Association for Advancement of Individual Potential (MA/AIP), an advocacy organization in behalf of education for gifted students.
The service base Nina brings to TfC includes consultation/facilitation for multi-level problem solving in education and business (e.g., program, curriculum and professional development, marketing, interpersonal and public relations strategies that address a wide range of existing and emerging needs within school and workplace settings.

Arthur Millman (Associate Professor of Philosophy) teaches in the Philosophy Department as well as in the CCT Program. For CCT, he regularly teaches "Critical Thinking" (CCT 601) as well as "Foundations of Philosophical Thought" (Phil 501). He is in the process of developing a new course called "Seminar in Critical Thinking," a follow-up for the Critical Thinking course, which explores recent developments and controversies and relates critical and creative thinking to applied and professional ethics. Arthur's research is in both the philosophy of science and applied ethics, and he has worked to help students with the integration and application of critical and creative thinking in a wide range of areas including elementary and secondary education and business.

Peter Taylor (Assistant Professor, CCT Program) joined the Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) Program in the Graduate College of Education at UMass Boston in the fall of 1998 and is enjoying new challenges teaching experienced educators, other mid-career professionals, and prospective K-12 teachers. His approach in his specialty--teaching critical thinking about science--is for students to explore the two-way interaction between science and social contextualization of science as a way to enlarge their sources of ideas about what else could be or could have been in science and in society. The larger goal is to promote a vision of critical science and environmental education that extends from teaching concepts and methods of science to students to involving citizens in community-based research. Working towards this goal has involved the kind of learning, sharing, and collegial support that he hopes TfC will foster. Over the last six or so years his own learning as a teacher has focused on writing through the curriculum and promoting student-teacher dialogue around written work, attention to learning and writing preferences, and designing opportunities for small group, co-operative, experiential, and problem- or project-based learning. The ideas and tools he brings to facilitating participation in groups and workshops have also been expanded through connections to Re-evaluation Counselling, and, more recently, the International Society for Exploring Teaching Alternatives, the Institute for Cultural Affairs and the International Association of Facilitators, the school of Sense-Making that builds on the work of Prof. Brenda Dervin of the Department of Communication at Ohio State, and the BioQuest Curriculum Consortium.
CCT's emphasis on reflective practice allows him to build on perspectives developed in the context of environmental studies (ES) and social studies of science and technology (STS). He has come to see complex ecological or environmental situations and, similarly, the social situations in which the environmental research is undertaken, as "intersecting processes" that cut across scales and involve heterogenous components. (See his contributions to a recent book he co-edited, Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities.) These situations cannot be understood from an outside view; instead positions of engagement must be taken within the complexity. Knowledge production needs to be linked with planning for action and action itself in an ongoing process so that knowledge, plans, and action can be continually reassessed in response to developments--predicted and surprising alike. In this spirit, ES, STS, and critical pedagogy/reflective practice have come together for him in a project of stimulating researchers to self-consciously examine the complexity of their social situatedness so as to change the ways they address the complexity of ecological and socio-environmental situations. TfC is already helping him further this work.