Howard Gardner

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981, the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences in 2011, and in 2015, he was awarded with the Brock International Prize in Education. In 2020, he was presented with the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education Award by the American Educational Research Association. He has received honorary degrees from thirty-one colleges and universities, including institutions in Bulgaria, Chile, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, and Spain. The author of thirty books translated into thirty-two languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be adequately assessed by standard psychometric instruments. 

 

For many years, Gardner was co-director of Project Zero and is now a member of its Executive Committee. He also directs The Good Project, a group of initiatives, founded in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, that promotes excellence, engagement, and ethics, preparing people of all ages to become good workers and good citizens who contribute to the overall well-being of society. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, the Project seeks to help individuals and groups reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions. For current information, please see thegoodproject.org.

 

With long-time colleague, Wendy Fischman, Gardner has recently completed a large-scale national study documenting how different groups think about the goals of college and the value of a traditional higher education in the United States. The study examined how the chief constituencies of campuses—incoming students, graduating students, faculty, senior administrators, parents, alumni/ae, trustees and job recruiters—think about these changes and how they may impact the college experience in our time.  Fischman and Gardner’s book, The Real World of College was published by MIT Press early in 2022. In 2020, Gardner’s intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, was published by MIT Press.

 

For more information on Gardner’s activities, please visit his website at www.howardgardner.com. This site also provides links to his l website on Multiple Intelligences theory at www.multipleintelligencesoasis.org, and his work on synthesizing.