Gerald S. Lesser
| Gerald S. Lesser | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Gerald Samuel Lesser August 22, 1926 Queens, New York, U.S. |
| Died | September 23, 2010 (aged 84) Lexington, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Known for | Sesame Workshop and Sesame Street |
| Spouse(s) | Stella Scharf |
Gerald Samuel Lesser (August 22, 1926 – September 23, 2010) was an American psychologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. Lesser was one of the chief advisers to the Children's Television Workshop (CTW, later known as the Sesame Workshop) in the development and content of the educational programming included in the children's television program Sesame Street. At Harvard, he was chair of the university's Human Development Program for 20 years, which focused on cross-cultural studies of child rearing, and studied the effects of media on young children. In 1974, he wrote Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street, which chronicled how Sesame Street was developed and put on the air. Lesser developed many of the research methods the CTW used throughout its history and for other TV shows. In 1968, before the debut of Sesame Street, he led a series of content seminars, an important part of the "CTW Model", which incorporated educational pedagogy and research into TV scripts and was used to develop other educational programs and organizations all over the world. He died in 2010, at the age of eighty-four, and was survived by his wife, a daughter, a son, and a grandchild.
Lesser was born on August 22, 1926 in Queens. The younger of two children, he grew up in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens and graduated from Jamaica High School. After two years at Columbia University, he served in the United States Navy during World War II and returned to finish his undergraduate degree and earn a master's in psychology at Columbia. He earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in child development and psychology in 1952, studying the effects of visual media on children and the design of educational programming. He married Stella Scharf in 1953.
Lesser taught education at Adelphi University and Hunter College, until hired by the Harvard School of Education (HSE) in 1963, where he taught developmental psychology and its application to education. He was also chair of Harvard's Human Development Program for 20 years, which focused on cross-cultural studies of child rearing and was responsible for recruiting developmental psychologists and cultural anthropologists who influenced the studies of child development and education in the U.S. The HSE honored Lesser with a professorship, the Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development; former Harvard dean Kathleen McCartney was a recipient. Lesser retired in 1998, and was a professor emeritus at Harvard until his death. Lesser's colleagues reported that he had a big impact on his students and colleagues. Even though he worked all over the world, he remained dedicated to his students and "remained an integral presence in the lives of his graduate students".
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