The author - Lilian Katz

Lilian Gonshaw Katz (born 1932) is a professor emeritus of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she is also the principal investigator for the Illinois Early Learning Project and a contributor to the Early Childhood and Parenting Collaborative. She founded two journals: Early Childhood Research Quarterly for which she served as editor-in-chief during its first six years, and Early Childhood Research & Practice the first online peer-reviewed early-childhood journal for which she remains editor-in-chief. Her scholarly work focused on the developmental stages of a teacher, child social development, and she has been a proponent of the project-based learning approach to childhood education, believing children learn best in informal and interactive situations.

She was born and raised in England, moving to the United States in 1947. She graduated from Wilson High School in Los Angeles in 1950 (voted "Most Likely to Succeed"), briefly attended Whittier College until 1952, married and gave birth to three children, returned to college in 1962 at San Francisco State College, received her BA in 1964, and then earned a PhD in child development from Stanford University in 1968. That same year, she took on the position of assistant professor of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where she remained throughout her academic career. She was the recipient of two Fulbright awards (India and New Zeland) and in 1997 she served as Nehru Professor at the University of Baroda in India.