Jonathan Silin began his professional life in the 1960s as a nursery school teacher in New York City. From his first days in the classroom, he found the questions raised by young children compelling in ways that he never would have imagined. This fascination with children propelled him to pursue a master’s degree at Bank Street College of Education. He has remained connected to this small progressive graduate school ever since.

After a decade in the classroom, Jonathan hungered for new ways to look at and understand children’s lives. His questions led him to complete a doctoral program at Teachers College, Columbia University. There he began to build a powerful critique of stage theories of human development. This work would become his signature contribution to the field of early childhood and one of the keystones of the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Conference.

Jonathan argues that simple linear models of development fail to account for differences across genders, sexualities, cultures, ethnicities and races. He poses more generous approaches that take into account the messiness of human experience and the ongoing challenges we all face across a lifetime. 

In the mid 1970s, Jonathan and his then life partner, the American photographer Robert Giard, moved to the village of Amagansett on the East End of Long Island. There Jonathan was a founding board member of one of the earliest and largest LGBTQ+ grassroots organizations in New York State. A decade later, he took up the fight against AIDS, helping to establish one of the first of seven community-based AIDS agencies in New York State. Ten years of dedicated AIDS advocacy, education and fund raising left little time for writing, but in 1987 his seminal article in the Teachers College Record, The Language of AIDS: Public Fears, Pedagogical Responsibilities prompted serious scholarly attention to the growing epidemic. 

Jonathan made his mark as a researcher, teacher, and writer by exploring the complicated interface between our professional and personal lives. His groundbreaking book, Sex, Death and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS has encouraged a generation of younger scholars to become more personally present in their writing and to advocate for socially relevant curriculum. 

These two themes—schools that reflect the lived experiences of children and teachers in today’s world, and the role of first person narrative in scholarship—have also guided Jonathan’s eighteen-year tenure as editor-in-chief of Bank Street’s Occasional Paper Series. Under his stewardship, the journal has grown from a distribution of 300 hard copies to an online presence garnering nearly 5000 downloads a year.

Jonathan’s impact on the field of education was first recognized in 1996, when he received the Educator of the Year award from the Lesbian and Gay Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. In 2014 he was recipient of the Bloch Distinguished Career Award from the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Conference. That year a special issue of Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education described his work. In 2016 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Bank Street College Alumni Association.