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| Molly Lynn Watt |
`Molly Lynn Watt is an educator, researcher, writer and activist. She was born in Danbury, Connecticut.
In 1963 she worked for Highlander Education and Research Center co-directing The North-South Smokey Mountain Workcamp with her then husband, Robert Lincoln Gustafson, in Townsend, Tennessee. The camp was raided and all participants landed in the Maryville Jail while the camp facilities were mysteriously burned. She moved back to the Boston area and directed work camps in Roxbury, Mass, sponsored by the A.F.S.C. and eleven local organizations including Norfolk Community Center, Freedom House, Saint Mark's Social Center, the B.R.A. and others groups. The goal for the camps was education of participants through working with residents in addressing housing and education issues.
During the 1970s she was active in the Open Education Movement and co-founded one of the nation's first teacher centers located in Brookline, Mass. She supported teachers as writers about their own practice, co-founding with Sarah Hull, Claryce Evans and Margaret Stubbs, The Children's Thinking Network Newsletter, published for five years from 40 Reservoir St. in Cambridge, MA. She was an Associate of the Prospect School in Bennington, Vermont,
In the 1980s, as an activist for experiential, hands-on learning, she traveled extensively giving key note talks at educational conferences and hands-on workshop putting the learner in charge. She advocated using the Logo computer language as a mathematical "sandbox" and the Bankstrret Writer as a blank page inviting free writing to encourage learners creativity consistent with research on the writing process. (This was at a time when there was a parallel development in programmed lessons for educational uses of computers.) In 1986 she traveled with a delegation of six educators to the People's Education Press in Beijing, China to lead the Logo and Educational Computing Workshop for 40 top educators in China. Apple gave them a computer lab as a gift to the Press which was at that time publishing all the curriculum for the 180 million school children on tradition presses. She wrote a monthly column in Teaching and Computers magazine called "Ask Molly", contributed articles toothier magazines, wrote a Logo Curriculum, "Welcome to Logo" published by D.C. Heath and co-authored Teaching wit Logo" with her husband, Daniel Watt, published by Addison Wesley in 1986.
In the 1990s until her retirement at Educational Development, Inc. she led projects funded by the NSF to support teachers of Logo conducting research in their own classrooms, editing a of teacher research with Daniel Watt, New Paradigms in Classroom Research, published by ICC. She took Action Research on-line as part of the Department of Education funded NCIP (national network of special education educators sharing best practices in inclusion.). She founded and directed the Action Research Center at E.D.C. in Newton,MA.
She is a founding member of Cambridge Cohousing where she has lived since 1998 with her husband, Daniel Lynn Watt and 88 others from age 1 to 90, determined to work together to reduce their carbon footprint and make decisions by consensus.
In 2004 she with Daniel Lynn Watt edited, published and performed excerpts of letters his parents exchanged during the Spanish Civil War. His father George Watt was a volunteer in the Lincoln Battalion and his mother Ruth Watt was an organizer and supporter in New York City. George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War.Molly Lynn Watt started hosting monthly poetry readings, The Fireside Series, in Cambridge, MA, became the editor for the BagelBards Anthology #1, #2, #3, #4. She served for several years as editor for poetry in the HILR Literary Review, and in 2007 Ibbetson Street Press published her f=volume of poetry, Shadow People.