Obituary of Gordon Pradl

April 17, 2020

Gordon Morrell Pradl, a longtime professor of English education at New York University, died from complications of the coronavirus on April 17 at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, Brooklyn, N.Y. He was 76 years old.

Gordon was born on December 6, 1943, in Montreal, Quebec, and grew up in Morristown, N.J. He graduated from Amherst College in 1965. Influenced by the college's freshman composition curriculum, he devoted his career to promoting progressive methods for the teaching of reading and writing. He taught high school in Hicksville, N.Y., while completing his M.A. degree at NYU, then went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Education program in language education. While writing his dissertation on the work of British teacher and scholar David Holbrook, he taught and served as the department chair at a junior high school in Newton, Mass.

During the 1970s, as New York City suffered a fiscal crisis and declines in the quality of public high schools, the City University of New York opened enrollments, granting broad access to post-secondary education. The admission of poorly prepared students at CUNY created an immediate need for remedial instructors at the college level. Gordon, hired at NYU in 1971, taught many of those instructors in the English Education Program, gently guiding graduate and doctoral students, and supervising scores of Ph.D. dissertations. A kind person with an insightful mind, he was insatiably curious, resolute, and brave in his thinking. He engaged with both students and colleagues by asking questions, and he skillfully entertained diverse points of view.

At NYU, he also founded and directed the English Education Study Abroad Program with Geoffrey Summerfield at the University of York and Oxford University. Students spent life-changing summer months in Britain, visiting schools and working with many of the most influential thinkers and teachers in English education, including James Britton, whose selected essays Gordon edited. He also trained hundreds of expository writing instructors for NYU's College of Arts and Science. For many years, he co-edited English Education, the journal of the English education section of the National Council of Teachers of English.

He wrote and published many articles and books, including Literature for Democracy, which in an era of high-stakes testing and individual performance argues that reading is a social act, and the teaching of literature must never be authoritarian. He served from 1999 through 2002 as the principal investigator on a research project concerned with reviving New York City's public schools funded by the Annenberg Foundation.

In 2010, after retiring from the Department of Teaching and Learning, which he had helped to establish 20 years earlier, he lent his editorial skills to his friends and colleagues, helping them to complete books. For the past five years, he belonged to the "Tuesday Lecture & Discussion Group," and one member recalls that he "never met anyone who had such a big heart and such a big intellect."

A fine cabinetmaker and craftsman, Gordon created many beautiful and useful objects from lumber and furniture he found on the street. He renovated and decorated a historic Brooklyn brownstone with antiques he collected with Mary Ann Carme Pradl, his wife of 52 years. Gordon and Mary Ann appreciated gardening, the arts, and classical music, and shared those loves with others through their patronage of public institutions. He also cherished his neighborhood, especially the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where he walked almost every day. With home health workers, he cared for Mary Ann who lived for 15 years with advanced dementia. Mary Ann's sister Josephine recalls that Gordon applied his intellect and resourcefulness to her sister's care as if it were an intellectual problem to be solved. Mary Ann died at home, a few days before Gordon's admission to the hospital. Family, friends, and generations of former students treasure his example of a good and committed life lived with generosity and thoughtfulness.

In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden in memory of Gordon and Mary Ann Pradl at 1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225.