Carolyn PopeEdwards: A Lifetime of Contributions

Carloyn Pope Edwards

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Reflections on Carolyn – by Sara Harkness

Carolyn Pope Edwards is the person I have most admired and loved among the many wonderful people I’ve known over the course of my own academic journey (with one important exception, of course).  Her spirit, her lively intellect, her tremendous productivity over a long career, and her friendship in the years following our work together in Kenya provided a model for my own work.

My last encounter with Carolyn was on the occasion of the Occasional Temperament Conference, held at the University of Nebraska in 2016.  Carolyn and Rick invited Charlie and me to join them for a very enjoyable dinner out, and we had a chance to talk about next steps for all of us.  Rick had persuaded Carolyn to retire, to which I responded with some objections – why should someone younger than I, who was still as active as ever, even think about retiring?  Carolyn’s response was that she had already accomplished everything she wanted to academically, and she was looking forward to spending more time with Rick, their children and grandchildren.  I was amazed at the very concept of having accomplished everything one wanted to, and her words have stayed with me – not only as a goal to which I might possibly aspire, but also as a blessing in Carolyn’s life.

Carolyn gave us so much – and now it’s our turn to build further on her contributions as researcher, mentor and friend.

A Tribute to an Old Friend – by Susan Abbott-Jamieson

Shock and then great sadness – my feelings upon learning about Carolyn’s death when I was asked to join a memorial panel to honor her at the Society of Psychological Anthropology’s 2019 Biennial Meeting.  I found it hard to believe at first.  I had been thinking about arranging a late spring or early summer visit with her at her home in Nebraska, as part of a drive out west to visit some spots along the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Idaho.  We had not been in touch for some time and I thought it a perfect opportunity to visit with her, catch up on our lives and work, and once more be warmed by that wonderful smile.

Carolyn and I first met at Harvard in the summer of 1972 when we were both getting ready to begin our doctoral research in Kenya as part of the Child Development Research Unit under John and Bea Whiting’s direction.  A University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student, I had just joined the Whitings’ Kenya project as a Research Associate and been given the task of carrying out research in a second Kikuyu community far from Ngecha.  Ngecha was a commuter Kikuyu village near Nairobi and one of several locations where observational data were gathered that were analyzed for Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior, co-authored by Bea and Carolyn.  Our time in Kenya partially overlapped, though she was based at the University of Nairobi while I was in Kagongo, Nyeri, 90 miles away.

Carolyn’s research interests at that time into the effects of environment upon the development of moral reasoning differed from mine into married women’s stress levels from the effects of economic, social and cultural change in a rural community.   Both projects shared the Whitings’ functionalist and materialist view of human development within local social structures and subsistence systems, and the cultural systems they produce.

Over the years I always looked forward to time spent with Carolyn, whether at professional meetings or during the six years she also taught at the University of Kentucky where I spent my academic career. She was inspiring in her enthusiasm for the work that engaged her, work that has inspired her students, colleagues, and a cross-national community of people concerned with understanding the development and promoting the education of young children within their particular social and cultural settings.

Although my academic career took me in different directions than Carolyn’s, her influence along with that of the “old Whiting crowd” could be seen in the content of the psychological anthropology course I taught for more than two decades.   What remains are my memories of a beloved, warm, and gentle woman whose laughter I still hear.

Carolyn Pope Edwards: A Memory in Honor of Her Life – by Charles M. Super

When I think of Carolyn, when I see her in my mind’s eye, she is smiling.  I realize she was probably not actually smiling all the time, but I think she smiled more than many of us, a gentle smile.  It seemed to display a calmness, a serenity, a slight distance from what was going on that somehow provided her enough space, enough perspective, to appreciate what she was seeing and doing. She was engaged and participating, and particularly listening, but she was also somehow watching with a smile.

I first met Carolyn in Kenya, in the second year – as I recall – Sara and I lived there.  As with you all and so many others, knowing Carolyn and even part of her lifetime’s work has influenced my thinking about parents, children, family life, culture, and how to do good by thinking those things through. Thinking them through with perspective, with a smile.

A Spirit of Two Research Circles: In Memory of Carolyn Pope Edwards – by Richard A. Shweder

When we were both students, Carolyn and I were participants in two monumental and memorable research circles (one or the other or both of which enriched the lives of many of us in this room).     The first time I ever trekked into an anthropological field site I was with Carolyn.  And I was the one who was huffing and puffing.  Carolyn was in far better physical shape than I in the summer of 1967 when we climbed to 8000 feet and hiked into the Zinacanteco village of Apas.  With us were Chep Hernandez (a key Zinacanteco informant and guide), the multi-talented John Haviland, musical instrument in hand (he had been to this village before and knew what was coming), Leslie Haviland (who was also no novice in this territory) and my wife Candy Shweder, who also outstripped me on the hike.   As you undoubtedly guessed one of those two memorable research circles surrounded Evon and Nan Vogt and was located at Harvard University and San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.

We slogged into Apas that day in the middle of a mid-year renewal ceremony, an all-male event which was in full inebriated swing.  That first field experience was quite memorable, perhaps because after a few hours of drinking someone walked up to me, had a look and said, “you are going to die.”  That was pretty much how I felt:  I spent the rest of the afternoon in wretched condition in a nearby corn field.  Carolyn, Leslie and Candy had a far better time of it.  Under the guidance of the women in the Hernandez household they learned how to make tortillas and they stayed healthy.

I am sure Carolyn labored intensely on her own personal ethnographic research project that summer.  Fieldwork is its own special kind of adventure.  Life in and around the Harvard Chiapas Project in 1967 was a time rich in all sorts of kinds of adventures (horseback riding in the mountains for example), contact with visiting anthropologists and psychologists (George Collier, Dwayne Metzger, the psychiatrist Pete Fabrega and even the pediatrician Berry Brazelton showed up to assess the reflexive responses of Zinacanteco babies), music and dances at the Vogt’s ranch and r and r at the local San Cristobal bath house (which as I recall was one of Carolyn’s favorite locations when she was not off doing field work, in part because as I recall she actually had a residence there).

We had originally met a few months before that trek into Apas.  She, a Radcliffe College undergrad, and I, a first year Harvard graduate student (along with several other undergraduates and one other graduate student) had been invited by “Vogtie” to spend the summer on his Chiapas project.  Vogtie and Nan (his wife) were famous for their sociality and love of music and dancing so the partying began early and often at their home in Weston, Massachusetts and we met occasionally in a preparatory training seminar.  That was the beginning of our friendship.  Around that time Caroline Pope married a young economist named Rick Edwards, who was very interested in the work of Karl Marx.

The other research circle in which Carolyn participated surrounded Beatrice and John Whiting and was located at Harvard University.  The circle extended to Tisbury Great Pond on Martha’s Vineyard (where the Whitings owned a vast amount land between pond and ocean; and of course, included the Child Development Research Unit (CDRU) in Kenya.   In those days Bea and John returned home to Martha’s Vineyard every summer (and almost every other moment they could) bringing some of Harvard and the rest of the international academic world with them.

It was there, after Carolyn had started working very closely with Bea Whiting on the comparative study of gender development that she and Rick and Candy and I really got to spend some quality time with each other, often with the Whitings.  Tears came to my eyes when I first learned of Carolyn’s premature death.  They came to my eyes again when I received a note from Rick Edwards, which he enclosed with a recently published copy of her co-edited Oxford University Press book on parenting and family structures – a note recalling those “good times long ago”, as he put it.  Carolyn and Rick bought some land from John and Bea and built a house right next to them on Tisbury Great Pond (which they occupied for a few years) just around the time Candy I also settled in part time on the Vineyard. That remarkable era and place I am about to conjure came to an end in 2003 when Beatrice Whiting died.  Many of you were lucky enough, as was Carolyn, as was I, to experience it.

What came to an end was a distinctive intellectual life style, which was inseparable from the atmosphere John and Bea Whiting had created and sustained for several decades at their Vineyard homestead.  Carolyn and Rick were very much part of it and their presence on the pond helped to make those years in the late 1970s and early 1980s ever so meaningful.

If you made the journey to the Whiting “establishment” (their little simple dwelling on the pond) back then as Carolyn and some of you did as students or young faculty, you bumped your way on a dirt road across hundreds of acres of Whiting land.  Then suddenly you emerged into an astonishing hidden community, full of lively debate, innovative (and sometimes radical) ideas and Yankee simplicity.  There were no phone lines or electric power lines on the Whiting homestead in those days.  Visitors lived in a boat house or farmhouse, or perhaps in a simple shack on the Whiting land along the Pond.  All over the place, tucked away in the woods, there were little sheds that were used as writing studios.  Harvard faculty and students often occupied these Spartan dwellings, for a weekend, or a week, or a month or even the whole summer.   The various, and by then, customary routines of the day were meant to exercise the body, the mind and a very special kind of rural spirit.  Days were a mix of agricultural activities (gardening, foraging, building a windmill), intellectual activities (occupying those writing studios to finish that next essay or book or complete one’s doctoral thesis), household activities (cooking the next collective meal) and recreational or sports activities (sunfish races on Tisbury Great Pond, swimming at the beach; later a Sunday croquet game was established).

But the real fun and highlight of any day began at 5:00PM when everyone in residence on the Whiting campus would arrive for drinks on the deck at The Establishment, which hung over the pond.  “What are you working on?” Bea and John would ask.  “So, what is your theory?”  “How are you going to measure that?”  And then the arguments and debates would begin.

Carolyn is now well-known for her comparative work on early childhood education, including schooling in Reggio Emilia, Italy.   But her work that captivated me first was Kenya based, using secondary data.  I have in mind Carolyn’s analysis of the moral foundation of social norms and the relevance of social communication to children’s moral development.   She analyzed naturally occurring social transgressions among Luo children in the South Nyanza District of Kenya.  It was a corpus of 105 transgression events originally observed in connection with a study conducted by Carol Ember.  The recorded events, which included verbatim transcripts of verbal accusations, commands, excuses and justifications between child caretakers (ages seven to sixteen) and their young charges consisted of a variety of violations.  Some of those transgressions, such as aggression towards peers and animals, were of the type that American developmental psychologists generally classified as moral (based on an rather ethnocentric and restricted conception of the moral domain that equated the moral domain with the objective principles of harm and justice ; while other of those transgressions, such as displays of deference, terms of address and appropriate greetings, correct use of titles and status terms, norms for avoidance and joking between relatives, were of the type that American developmental psychologists generally classified as non-moral, subjective or consensus-based and thus as merely conventional.   Carolyn showed that both types of norms (the so-called moral norms and the so-called non-moral conventional norms) were viewed as equally important and unconditional by Luo caretakers and communicated as such when transgressions occurred.  As Carolyn argued “justice, harm and welfare rules” on the one hand [the type of rules viewed as moral rules by American developmental psychologists] and conventional rules on the other, are not necessarily learned in different kinds of social encounters.” At least for the Luo she suggested, relationships of status, power, age and kinship, and the proper forms of address, greeting, avoidance, and deferential displays are understood as part of the natural moral order of things.  They are not perceived as mere social norms or conventions outside the moral order of things.

It was not possible to watch Carolyn in action in those late afternoon sessions on Tisbury Great Pond, arguing with John Whiting when he was in his full provocative mode, without being impressed by her combination of calm, tenacity and persuasively organized intelligence.   There was play and pleasure in the way she figured out how to debate with John Whiting, when with a bourbon in one hand, and the other hand pounding the table he might declare “well, that’s bullshit” with a broad smile on his face.  She too knew how to forcefully disagree with a smile on her face (and hold her own), the more so when John was at his most provocative, asking questions such as “What makes you think literacy is such a good thing?;” or “ Wouldn’t the world be a better place if oral traditions were alive and well and everyone had to communicate face to face?; or “Which is more traumatic: being circumcised in adolescence as part of a ritual initiation into adulthood or going to school?”.   She was especially impressive when the question took the form “How early in life do sex role differences emerge around the world, and why?”  She often had Bea Whiting on her side.

Longingly I feel the presence of her absence at this meeting. I miss her.  I am sure you do too. And I recognize too that her death is a poignant reminder of the passing of a wonderful era.

Remarks for a Memorial for Carolyn Edwards – by Thomas S. Weisner

There are many of us here today who know Carolyn as a teacher and mentor, who worked with her on her Italian research, in education, at University of Nebraska, and many other aspects of her career. So I would like to mention some of the many contributions she made to comparative child development, her work with Bea and John Whiting in particular, and her leadership in publishing Children of Different Worlds 1988 with Bea.

Carolyn also was instrumental in writing and publishing the book Ngecha: A Kenyan community in a time of rapid social change with Bea Whiting in 2004. That book showed that, far from being overwhelmed, the Ngecha mothers coped and adapted to change by modifying their parenting goals and behavior to prepare their children for future wage-earning jobs requiring schooling.

Carolyn made significant cross-cultural and theoretical contributions to so many empirical topics as well:  play, gender, moral development, immigration and effects on families and children, mothers and facilitation of cultural change, early child development programs, improvements in education and training for teachers, and much more. She had a very significant influence at AERA in education, and at NAEYC in early childhood research. These were other disciplinary and professional silos where she was very influential and made important contributions.

Carolyn was a fierce advocate for the cultural learning environment model, or CLE, part of the psychocultural conceptual framework for the study of child development. She also was, characteristically, a constructive critic who moved these ideas forward in so many ways. For example, Carolyn wrote a paper (with Mimi Bloch) for the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology special issue in 2010 called “The Whitings' concepts of culture and how they have fared in contemporary psychology and anthropology”.

The 5 CLE concepts she considered are “… (a) the assumption of the psychic unity of humankind, (b) the cultural learning environment construct itself, (c) the psychocultural model, (d) the synergistic relationship of the disciplines of psychology and anthropology, and (e) the role of mothers as agents of social change through child-rearing roles as well as through various other ways they guide change in the communities and learning environments of their families and children. So: how have all these deeply important ideas fared in the past 40 years at that time, in Carolyn’s view?

Psychic unity? Still being debated today; context has become much more important, but universal assumptions and findings still are useful.  The CLE? Unsurprisingly, Carolyn sees this as “… one of the strongest and most enduring contributions … to psychology, anthropology, and education“ , along with the many extensions and revisions of the original CLE framework.  The psychocultural model? There are debates and questions about the linear and causal assumptions of this model, and the psychodynamic assumptions in it, but “… there is a strong, ongoing search for contextual, evolutionary, transactional, and systemic models [ongoing today].”   “Cultural, historical, ecological, and biological explanations still are central for a comprehensive and general understanding of children’s learning and development.“  Synergy between anthropology and psychology? It is exploding in importance everywhere, Carolyn finds! Finally, the important roles of mothers in social change and socialization?  “The idea that women are agents of societal change in their parenting role as well as active change agents in society—[continues to be extremely important and remains so today]. “

Carolyn and I co-edited an issue of Ethos in 2001 honoring Bea Whiting’s contributions, (with contributions from Sara Harkness and Charlie Super, Carol and Mel Ember, Bob LeVine, Lee Munroe, and Susan Seymour who are all here today), and we co-edited the special issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. (Which started at a terrific IACCP conference held at Spetsos Island in Greece!)

Carolyn also participated in a conference held at a small hotel in Kakamega, the capital of Western Province, Kenya in 1992 on African families and social change. There were maybe 50 people there, about 13 from the US and Europe and the rest students and faculty from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania (and some participants from my field site about 50 miles away as well). Carolyn wrote about one of her many topics: morality and moral development in Kenya, for that conference and book. Characteristic of Carolyn’s work, these in-depth interviews in Kenya found both some common, core values (respect, harmony, interdependence, and unity as central family virtues everywhere) and also differences due to the influence of Catholic, Quaker, or Protestant evangelical church missions in these Kenyan communities, as well as younger and more educated student informants taking somewhat different moral positions.

Carolyn was an incredible scholar, researcher, colleague, and friend. She was an important part of our convoy through professional life and was a leader for all of us in many ways. She came to Los Angeles in recent years since her son and daughter-in-law lived in LA; she organized visits to the Beverly Hills Hotel for brunch and the Peterson Auto Museum, and we met during research conferences  in LA as well. She recently participated in a large invited session at SRCD I organized on culture and human development and gave a terrific presentation. She has had an enduring influence in so many fields, and was such a wonderful person, a central part of my and so many others’ collective journey throughout our careers and lives. I miss her.

Memories of Carolyn Pope Edwards – by Robert A. LeVine

Carolyn Pope Edwards had a significant influence in the field of early childhood education through her work with Reggio Emilia, Italy, for more than three decades. In the late 1980s when U.S. educators and academics were first hearing about a small town in northern Italy with exceptional early childhood services, including publicly-funded infant-toddler centers and preschools, Carolyn was already there observing, meeting the founder, Loris Malaguzzi, interviewing educators, and building relationships—true to her anthropological roots.

The early years of exchange between American and Reggio Emilian educators were hindered by a language obstacle. No written materials existed in English. The 1993 publication of the first edition of The Hundred Languages of Children book was a major contribution to scholarship in the U.S. That publication, now in its third edition, stands alone as the seminal resource for the education project of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Carolyn’s collegial work made it possible for a global community to access the most important example of early childhood evolution in the last one hundred years.

In 2010, Carolyn was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance. On the occasion of that award, then mayor of Reggio Emilia, Graziano Delrio, thanked her for her efforts in giving visibility to his town. She published numerous articles and subsequent books in connection with Reggio Emilia.

At a more personal level, I have two books co-authored by Carolyn Pope Edwards that are inscribed to me. One is Ngecha: A Kenyan Village in a Time of Rapid Social Change, co-authored with Beatrice B. Whiting, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2004, the year after Bea Whiting died. Carolyn mentions in her Acknowledgements that Bea “was very satisfied that this book had been finished and would be part of her legacy.” The other book is Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior, by Beatrice Blyth Whiting and Carolyn Pope Edwards published by Harvard University Press in 1988. Bea inscribed it herself to Sarah and me. It expanded the Six Cultures Study to 6 more field sites and provides both quantitative and qualitative data on them. As the books indicate, I was instrumental in helping the Carnegie Corporation of New York design and fund the studies.

Returning to Carolyn, it is terrible that her life was terminated by a rare disease. We miss her greatly.

Discovering Carolyn – by Maria de Guzman

It was in the mid-1990s when I first came across the work of Carolyn Pope Edwards. I was an undergraduate student in Manila and I was tinkering with our university’s newly acquired electronic index when I found information about a book she co-wrote with Beatrice Whiting, titled, Children of Different Worlds. Drawn to Carolyn’s research on the cultural socialization of children, I read whatever papers of hers that I could get my hands on  and several years later, I had the fortune of coming to work with her for my graduate training at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Carolyn made numerous significant contributions to the fields of psychology, human development, anthropology and early childhood education. Her early work explored such topics as the universality of moral development as conceptualized by Lawrence Kohlberg; and the development of children across different cultural contexts. Both her fieldwork and cross cultural analysis of data on children from various communities contributes to our understanding today of how culture is reflected (and thus reproduced) in the everyday mundane contexts in which we raise our children; as well as how specific aspects of the caregiving context shape us as individuals and also as members of a cultural community.

Given Carolyn’s immense body of work, it is difficult to choose a specific contribution so I will focus here on two dimensions of her career that have always inspired me both professionally and personnally. First of these was Carolyn’s application of her scholarly expertise to the field of early learning contexts. Carolyn was an intellectual force who could examine issues with such a critical eye and whose early research utilized a range of rigorous and creative research methods – interviews, observations, surveys, fieldwork, and others. Although she had an extremely prodcutive research program throughout her career, her later work was focused on directly applying her content knowledge and methodological expertise to making sure that children around the world have access to rich and stimulating environments.

Many aspects of Carolyn’s work on early childhood education reflected her training and expertise on children’s development in cultural contexts. When I first came to UNL, Carolyn was developing a program to help train early childhood teachers with the practice of ‘documentation’ and how to capture various dimensions of children’s development that went beyond the usual checklists and standardized measures. She talked about developing rich descriptions of children’s everyday contexts and capturing not just the finished products of their work but also the processes and social exchanges that children had as they developed their artwork, block constructions and other projects. Documentation not only provided a rich record of children’s learning but also served as a wonderful memento for parents and teachers that allowed them insight into the backstory of a photo or a child’s project, and to inform future programming with children. To me, this was reminiscent of anthropological fieldwork that Carolyn had also done so well. Except that this time, she was not conducting close observations of funeral rights in the Yucatan (as she had as an undergraduate) but teaching others on how to apply similar methodology to better understand and teach young learners.

When Carolyn was awarded the Outstanding Research and Creativity Award in 2012 at the University of Nebraska (perhaps the most prestigious award given by the NU system), she said “I’m really trying to bring important concepts back and forth between these different fields … my new goal is to help children and families achieve a better quality of life." Indeed, Carolyn’s work epitomizes transdisciplinarity as well as the application of research to improve the lives of others.  At a time when scholars are sometimes criticized for conducting research for research’s sake, Carolyn focused on the application of her content and methodological expertise that resulted in such products as the development of rating systems to determine and communicate the quality of children’s learning environments; as well as the study of high quality learning programs such as the Reggio Emilia approach, and its adaptation and application to a range of locales from the US Midwest to orphanages in China.

The second dimension of Carolyn’s work that has personally inspired me was her work as a mentor. Carolyn taught hundreds of students around the world and advised dozens of graduate students in psychology, education, human development and family studies. Her students hailed from the United States, Venezuela, Philippines, Turkey, China, South Korea, and others.  She told me once that just like parenting, advisors can fall into one of of Baumrind’s four parenting dimensions. And she said “I think I’m a democratic advisor, don’t you?” Indeed, Carolyn was both supportive but had high demands. And although this was quite impossible given what an intellectual titan she was, she always insisted on equal status between herself and her students – treating our humble ideas as students with keen interest and validity.

When Carolyn passed away and the news was shared among her former students, there was a spontaneous sharing of memories on FB messenger among those of us who were her students at UNL.  One of her former students poigniantly captured how Carolyn was as a mentor “She was such a caring person. Kindness radiated off of her. But at the same time, she was incredibly honest about what she tought. Having her on my committee made my dissertation better than it would have been.” Another student shared, “Carolyn has been among the most influential people in my life, ” and “her kindness and humility always left me calm.”   Of course there were also touching anecdotes as “The image of her permanently etched onto my mind is … in the middle of teaching she insisted on holding a newborn that needed to accompany mom to class. She could do everything.” And added “She also sneaked in wine and cheese from Italy into class after a trip.”

I’d like to end with the dedication from the volume, Parenting from Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance, which was the final collaboration that Jill Brown (another of her former students) and I had with Carolyn; as I believe this truly captures how Carolyn was as a mentor and colleague – how she challenged and inspired those who had the fortune of working with her. We wrote, “Carolyn Pope Edwards has been family to us for close to 20 years. She has inspired, pushed, and cared for many over her career. Her commitment to connecting her fierce intellect with her informed heart has encouraged us to ask the questions that helps us discover and reconnect to the deepest parts of ourselves.” She will be missed by so many.   

Obituary from U. of Nebraska

Carolyn Pope Edwards, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lin­coln for 18 years, was a renowned expert in how children learn. Before coming to the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edwards taught at Vassar College and the Universities of Massachusetts and Kentucky.

Dr. Edwards’ life mission was raising the quality of young children’s education by understanding how children develop and thrive cognitive­ly, socially, and morally. In tireless pursuit of that mission, she traveled extensively to Italy, China, and many other countries, educating child­care professionals and giving countless public addresses, workshops, and teacher training sessions. Through her study of the pioneering approach to early childhood education developed in the schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy, she became an advocate for the Reggio model and was instrumen­tal in its adoption to improve learning environments for children.

Dr. Edwards authored more than a dozen books, including “The Hun­dred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Education”, written with George Foreman and Lella Gandi­ni. “The Hundred Languages of Children” documented the many ways in which children communicate their thoughts and ideas and how the schools of Reggio foster learning through that communication. It be­came a central point of reference for those who work in early childhood education and was translated into numerous languages. Among many other honors, she won NU’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activi­ty award, its highest research honor, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance.

She is survived by her husband Richard; her three children Samuel, George, and Rebecca; her four grandchildren, Henry, Sylvia, Simon, and Owen; her sisters Georgia Pope and Kathleen Hughes; and by her many former students in whom she imbued critical thinking and a fierce deter­mination to help young children. Carolyn was a devoted mother, grand­mother, spouse, and sister; an audiobook lover; a collector; a Husker fan; a cat person; a pasta bolognese enthusiast; and a world traveler. Her family will miss her sharp sense of humor, her empathy with people from all walks of life, and her deep love for her family.