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