Jerome Bruner
Bruner
Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) was an American psychologist and educational thinker whose career stretched across the cognitive revolution, developmental psychology, and educational reform. Though not an ELT specialist, he became indispensable to language education through ideas that teachers absorbed so thoroughly they often forgot where they came from.
Bruner had the mind of a reformer and the prose of a patient persuader. He was one of those rare figures whose ideas escaped their home discipline and began quietly reorganizing the language of teaching itself.
Career
- Major figure in twentieth-century cognitive and educational psychology
- Worked at institutions including Harvard and Oxford
- Helped shape debates on curriculum, development, and meaning-making across disciplines
- Entered ELT indirectly, through educational ideas later naturalized in teacher education
Published Work
- The Process of Education (1960)
- Toward a Theory of Instruction (1966)
- Acts of Meaning (1990)
- The Culture of Education (1996)
Influence
- Major indirect influence on language teaching through Scaffolding, discovery learning, and curriculum thinking
- Helped make guided learning feel developmental rather than merely directive
- One of the background figures without whom modern teacher-education language would sound very different