Whole Intelligence - A Conversation with Malcolm Parlett

Malcolm Parlett has had an active and distinguished career in
educational research, training and gestalt therapy. He obtained a
first class honours degree in Psychology from the University of
Nottingham in 1962. He became a research student working in the
Psychological Laboratory at King’s College, Cambridge. His Ph.D
research was into memory and selective perception.


Moving from experimental psychology to pursue applied studies in
education, he worked in the Education Research Center at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an Associate
Professor of Teaching and Learning Analysis, before being
appointed as a Lecturer in Educational Sciences at the University
of Edinburgh. At MIT he developed his innovative qualitative
research method, “illuminative evaluation”, to investigate
students’ experiences of education. He also conducted a major
study for Wellesley College, and became a colleague and friend of
Professor Donald Schön.


Malcolm was Principal research officer at the National Foundation
of Educational Research and a member of the Group for Research
and Innovation in Higher Education at the Nuffield Foundation. He
was also a research associate in the Department of Educational
Studies at Oxford University. Later, he directed a consulting
group – the Higher Education Study Group – in Newton,
Massachusetts and worked for a variety of colleges, foundations,
and overseas agencies, including the Exxon Education Foundation,
the Lilly Endowment, UNICEF, and USAID. Malcolm was also a
Professor at the Open University, in the Institute of Educational
Technology.


Malcolm went on to train in gestalt philosophy and methods and
then worked all over the world as a distinguished gestalt
therapist, consultant and speaker. He was the founding Editor of
the British Gestalt Journal, a position he held for 16 years.


In his early research he was the author of several papers and
chapters about higher education, qualitative research, and
science education, including one in Nature. In 1977 he co-edited
Beyond the Numbers Game – A reader in educational evaluation and
also Introduction to Illuminative Evaluation: Studies in higher
education. 


In 2015 his book, Future Sense: Five explorations of whole
intelligence for a world that’s waking up, was published and has
been reviewed in the Gestalt Review and the BGJ. In 2016 he
edited and contributed to a collection, Contact and Context: New
directions in gestalt coaching. 


In 2020 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the
Gestalt Organisation and System Development Center, in Cleveland,
Ohio.


Social Links


LinkedIn: @malcolmparlett


Website: www.wholeintelligence.org


Email: malcolm.parlett@myphone.coop