George E. Hein, Senior Research Associate and Professor Emeritus

Professor Emeritus George E. Hein retired in June 1998, after over twenty years of teaching and administrative work at Lesley College. Together with Brenda Engel, he co-founded PERG in 1976 to evaluate the educational work of twenty-five museums and arts organizations in the Boston area. He has remained active in this area ever since, developing comprehensive, qualitative evaluation systems for museum programs and exhibits, as well as for mathematics and science education programs.

Prof. Hein has served three-year terms as both secretary and chair of ICOM/CECA, the international professional association for museum educators, and was elected to the AAM/ICOM Board. He was also the founding director of the Lesley College Ph.D. program, guiding it through its initial state authorization and regional accreditation. In 1985, a new Division for Advanced Graduate Study and Research was created as part of the Lesley College Graduate School to house the Ph.D. Program, and George was appointed its dean.

In 1990, Dr. Hein spent a sabbatical semester as a Fulbright Fellow with Prof. Paul Black at King's College, London. In 1996, he took sabbatical leave with NSF support to study learning in museums and serve as a visiting faculty member at the Museum Studies Program at Leicester University. More recently, he was the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Visiting Scholar at CalTech, where he gave a short course on learning in museums, as well as an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and a visiting faculty member at Technical University in Sydney, Australia.

Together with PERG colleague Sabra Price (now Sabra Lee), Professor Hein co-authored Active Assessment for Active Science, published by Heinemann in 1994. In 1998, his book, Learning in the Museum, was published by Routledge, along with a monograph, Museums: Places of Learning, written with Mary Alexander and commissioned by AAM EdCom in honor of its twenty-fifth anniversary. Some recent papers and lectures can be found on George Hein's Lesley University home page.

Since retirement, Professor Hein has continued active participation in PERG's activities and as a consultant and advisor to museums and other professional organizations.