University Communications

UCLA: The Next Generation
You don't have to talk to the Nobel Prize selection committees or the nominating board of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to know that UCLA is long past the days of the "gutty little Bruins" when this was a campus of feisty academic up-and-comers. Loaded with the likes of world-renowned Nobelists Paul Boyer and Donald Cram (chemistry) and Louis Ignarro (medicine), and such internationally recognized historians as Joyce Appleby and Saul Friedlander, UCLA has fielded a team of professors, researchers and physicians who have transformed Westwood into a prestigious global center of learning and cutting-edge scholarship, mentioned now in the same breath with such revered institutions as Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. It may soon be the premier university in the world. Racing behind this vanguard is a well-stocked bullpen, as it were, an up-and-coming generation of gifted professors and researchers who are already breaking new ground in fields as diverse as language and dance, law and molecular biology. Following are eight young guns who promise to make Westwood the new "Dodge City" of learning in the next millennium.
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Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Megan Franke
Assistant Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education & Information Studies

Megan Franke teaches learning. In fact, her students are teachers who learn to learn from children. As upside-down as the system may sound, Franke's revolutionary new way of viewing elementary school education could lead to rethinking our entire approach to educating. To understand it, though, requires a little adjusting of old thinking caps.

"Adults don't think the same way about mathematics as children do," explains Franke, who draws from a background in educational psychology and mathematics to unravel the thinking patterns of children as they solve problems. "When you ask them, they have some amazing ways of solving a problem."

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