Norman Brosterman
Norman Brosterman is an architect, artist, cultural historian, and award-winning author who is nationally recognized for unearthing and chronicling the origins, techniques, and aims of the original, historic, kindergarten system. His collection of 19th century kindergarten work by teachers and children provides contemporary educators and historians of modern art access to the remarkable lost world of creative play that was the foundation of kindergarten from its invention in 1839.
Because his expertise bridges the realms of pre-school education and modern art and architecture, Norman Brosterman has spoken at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Indianapolis Children's Museum, as well as at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple and the Guggenheim Museum. Norman Brosterman is the author of several books, including Inventing Kindergarten, a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the American Institute of Architect's award for best book of the year on children's issues. He also wrote Out Of Time: Designs for the Twentieth Century Future, on the graphic history of past futures and curated the Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition it accompanied.
An informative and entertaining speaker, Norman Brosterman's discovery that kindergarten was designed to teach children how to learn by cultivating their innate abilities to observe, reason, express, and create, has influenced educators throughout the world. While his juxtapositions of old kindergarten work with the designs of titans like Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, and Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, have essentially re-written the standard history of the modern era, spurring the New Yorker magazine to describe Inventing Kindergarten as "revelatory."
