Lois Hetland

Professor and Chair of Art Education. MCAD

Lois Hetland is professor and chair of Art Education at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and senior research affiliate at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2000. Trained in music and visual arts and formerly an elementary and middle school classroom teacher for 17 years, her work as a developmental psychologist focuses on learning, understanding, and teaching in the arts and other disciplines. Her most recent prior research was a series of meta-analytic reviews for Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP), 1997–2000, including two reviews of music’s effects on spatial reasoning. That project’s work was published in an invited special issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, which she co-edited. REAP has been widely discussed in Beyond the Soundbite: Arts Education and Academic Outcomes (co-editor, 2001), in a dedicated issue of the Arts Education Policy Review (May/June, 2001), in commentary on National Public Radio, and in articles in The New York Times, Education Week, and numerous other newspapers and magazines. Lois was co-principal investigator of Project Zero’s subcontract to the Alameda County Office of Education’s VALUES Project (Visual Arts Learning for Understanding Education in Schools) and of a second subcontract focused on the spread of that pilot, both funded by the United States Department of Education. She was also a co-principal investigator of the Qualities of Quality Project, funded by the Wallace Foundation, served as education chair of Project Zero’s annual summer institute from 1996 to 2005, taught online professional development courses for teachers on Harvard’s WIDE platform (Widescale Interactive Development for Educators) from 2000 to 2005, and consults nationally and internationally on arts and on teaching and learning for understanding. She authored the staff development guide to Project Zero’s video series, Educating for Understanding, and co-edited two volumes based on Project Zero’s institutes.