Elizabeth G. Cohen, founder of 'Complex Instruction,' dead at 73

By Lisa Trei

Elizabeth G. Cohen, the founder of "Complex Instruction," a groundbreaking pedagogy that applied sociological theory to promote equity in the classroom, died of cancer March 12 at her home on campus. She was 73.

On Sunday, May 15, a gathering to honor Cohen's life and work will be held from 2 to 5 p.m. in the lobby of the Center for Educational Research at Stanford (CERAS), 520 Galvez Mall.

"She had a deep sense of justice and morality," said Associate Professor of Education Rachel Lotan, a longtime colleague and friend who credits Cohen for encouraging her and dozens of other female graduate students to pursue an academic career. "She was a fighter and had no patience with fools. She was an outstanding teacher. She employed all the pedagogical principles to her own work. She walked her talk."

Myra Strober, a professor in the School of Education, said Cohen was "an untiring mentor." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Strober and Cohen co-taught a graduate course called Gender and Education. "She was so wise on issues of women in education," Strober said. "She helped so many undergraduate and graduate women understand what was going on in the classroom."

Cohen chaired more than 86 doctorates in education and influenced the lives of countless students, including Alejandro Toledo, the president of Peru, who earned a doctorate from the school in 1992. In 2003, Toledo returned to campus to deliver that year's commencement address. At a reception honoring the president, Lotan said that Toledo told Cohen: "I will never forget your class. It was the class that taught me the most."

Cohen, a native of Worcester, Mass., was appointed an assistant professor in the School of Education in 1966 and became its first full female professor in 1975. Later, she received a joint appointment in sociology.

In 1979, Cohen founded the Program for Complex Instruction that she directed until her retirement in 1999. The program, which has been adapted for use in elementary and middle schools nationally and internationally, uses special strategies of teaching and support for teachers whose classes are culturally and academically diverse. Cohen successfully developed ways to promote equality among small groups of heterogeneous students while maintaining high-quality instruction, by valuing the different kinds of positive contributions different children make to classroom life and learning.

"Her goal was to give all kids access to quality instruction," Lotan said. "Over and over, people have said that her work was focused on the single-minded pursuit of building equitable classrooms. She was able to take theory and translate it into practical principles and practical interventions to help kids from a wide variety of backgrounds."

Cohen cared deeply about gender equity, said Bernard Cohen, her husband of more than 50 years and a sociology professor emeritus. She had faced discrimination personally when she applied to Harvard for a doctoral degree and when she fought to get hired at Stanford. At Harvard, Bernard said, Gordon Allport, a director of graduate admissions and, ironically, a noted expert on racial prejudice, did not want to admit Cohen despite her stellar academic credentials from Clark University, where she had earned a bachelor's degree in 1953. "She was told it was a waste of time [to enter the program] because women got married and had kids," he said. But Elizabeth, who married Bernard three days before entering graduate school, went on to become one of the first women to be named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in 1954. In 1958, she was among the first group of women to earn a doctorate in sociology from Harvard. Elizabeth arrived at the graduation ceremony six months pregnant, her husband recalled. "Allport turned green," he said.

In 1959, the Cohens came to Stanford following a brief stint at the University of California-Berkeley. Bernard said the family agreed to move because Stanford had a policy that permitted academic couples to join the faculty of the same institution. For the first five years, when the couple's children were very young, Elizabeth worked part time as a research associate. "Then, invariably, I was frustrated and began to feel exploited," Elizabeth Cohen said in a 1977 interview with the Stanford News Service. In 1964, the School of Education needed someone on short notice to teach a course called the Social Foundations of Education. Although it was not Cohen's area of specialization, she was hired and began a new career teaching education students.

A year later, however, when a tenure-track appointment in sociology and education opened up, Cohen discovered that she was not included in the nationwide search. "We raised hell," Bernard said. Eventually, the school relented and included Cohen. She was hired but, because she was already 35 years old, Bernard said the school required her to be considered for tenure in three years instead of up to five years, as was customary. "It was necessary for me to get a book out in three years and to demonstrate that I could raise research funds," Elizabeth Cohen said in the 1977 interview. "I felt I had to do more than ordinary faculty members. I had to prove a woman could raise kids and do a full share." Cohen was granted tenure in 1969. In the appointment announcement, she was praised for successfully developing a new field of study in the school—the sociology of education—with "imagination and intellectual élan."

Cohen wrote many books and articles including the widely used Designing Groupwork: Strategies for Heterogeneous Classrooms (1994) and Working for Equity in Heterogeneous Classrooms: Sociological Theory in Practice, which she edited with Lotan (1997). She was a recipient of a 1998 Presidential Citation of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and, in 2003, the Award for a Distinguished Career in Applied Sociology of Education presented by the Sociology of Education Special Interest Group of AERA. Cohen served in several professional positions and organizations, including chair of Social Sciences in Education at the School of Education, vice president of the Sociology of Education Association and a trustee of Clark University.

Cohen is survived by her husband, Bernard, of Stanford; her daughter, Anita Cohen-Williams, of San Diego; her son, Lewis Cohen, of Oakland; and a granddaughter. The family requests that contributions in Cohen's memory be made to the Stanford School of Education and earmarked for the "Elizabeth Cohen Memorial Fund for Work Toward Equity in Classrooms."

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