Jean Illsley Clarke, TSTA (E) (1925–2021), will receive the 2022 Fanita English Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously. Trudi Newton, in her nomination statement, wrote, “Jean earned this award for her lifetime of commitment to building healthy family and educational systems to support the healthy development of all children. She did this through her books, her teaching, and her personal example in her long life. She ensured a rightful recognition of the value and significance of the educational field in the ITAA.
We are proposing Jean for her lifetime of achievement in so many arenas: theory, writing, innovation, philanthropy, and teaching. I especially want to honor her in the area of enabling others to learn. She transformed the T in TSTA from ‘Teaching’ to a genuinely cocreative process of everyone present learning, including herself.” Janice Dowson added, “From our initial meeting in the late 1970s to our last conversation at the 2019 Raleigh conference, Jean modeled professional commitment and personal creativity. She was a consummate teacher whose curiosity and interest in learning from others counted among her most engaging teaching tools. Jean’s outstanding capacity for personal connection through casual conversations in liminal learning spaces has been a significant, perhaps unrecognized, lifelong contribution to the TA community.
Jean’s career as a writer and parent educator had two parts: one as an accomplished workshop leader and a nationally certified and internationally known parent educator, another as a pioneering transactional analyst who was committed from her first contact with TA to translating its theories, concepts, and philosophy into an educational and parenting context.
In her many books and articles, she always aimed to present ideas as positive guidance, and in this, she inspired others to do the same.” Giles Barrow wrote, “Jean was the founder of the field of educational TA and the great-grandmother from which all other TA educators have come. Some of us worked directly with her, many of us have learned from those who did. Certainly, hundreds, if not thousands, of parents, teachers, and children have been informed by the affirmations, resources, and programs generously given and inspired by Jean. She touched into the practice and philosophy of many of us through her supportive supervision, wise counsel, and wit. Communities of practice grow from the fertile lives of the ancestors, and Jean’s generative capacity was in full flow long before she left us. If we are a more robust network of educational practitioners it has something to do with Jean.”
Jean received the 1995 Eric Berne Memorial Award in the area of practice applications for her work in applied transactional analysis in parent education and the John Gladfelter Life Values Award from the USA Transactional Analysis Association. The nominators for this award included Trudi Newton, Diane Salters, Janice Dowson, Giles Barrow, Susannah Temple, Jan Grant, Rosemary Napper, and Tomoko Abe. Used by permission The Script April 2022.
