Diane Cohen: Creativity and Innovation in Early Childhood Education
It was Diane’s warmth, friendliness, and good cheer that helped me to feel as comfortable as I could at Newman as a new student. With a small group of girls, we sat on the floor in the senior girls’ lounge and ate lunch together every day. Diane also recalls that she was selected by Madame, the Newman French teacher, to accompany me in an independent study where we went to the library to do individual reading and write essays in French during class time. She remembers reading Sartre “with much dictionary help.” I wish I could remember what I was reading. During the pandemic Diane is again studying the French language, this time via zoom.
Today she lives in New Orleans with her husband, Michael Nusbaum, and she appears to be quite happily retired from a pioneering career in education, which included founding her own school in Mandeville. Initially Diane was a special education preschool teacher and later she taught early childhood education at Delgado Community College. She and Michael spend their free time enjoying their main passions, dancing and canoeing. In retirement she is currently a licensed volunteer New Orleans tour guide (with a special microphone for social distancing). They have one daughter, Eva Claire, who graduated from the University of Chicago and lives in New Orleans.
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Diane is a licensed volunteer New Orleans tour guide. On the left she is leading a French Quarter tour. She is Cabildo-trained, meaning she doesn't make up the history during the tour. On the right she is dressed for a Ghostly Gallivant Halloween Tour.
Diane and Mike canoeing on a peaceful bayou.
Diane and Michael purchased her parents’ home in July 2005 when Diane’s parents moved into an independent living apartment. A few weeks later they lost nearly everything in their home when it was flooded during Hurricane Katrina; like many other residents of the Lakeview district they gutted their house and slowly rebuilt it. They were grateful that they were the ones, and not her aging parents, who lost their belongings and their home base. As Diane describes it, they were offered a comfortable diaspora life in Baltimore with the Nusbaum family, but “succumbed to the irresistible urge to come home to rebuild New Orleans.” They volunteered in the cleanup and replanting of City Park and raised funds for the return of the child care center at Delgado.
Diane attended elementary school at Andrew H. Wilson Public School, along with our Newman classmates Marilyn Lake, Steve Yellin, Mark Wallfisch, John Menszer, Steve Katz, Joel Jacobs, and David Weisler. She transferred to Newman in the seventh grade, and she and all of her siblings graduated from Newman. She told me that the children of Holocaust survivors in New Orleans attended the same public school and tended to remain in public school. I asked Diane how she knew as a young elementary school student that some of her classmates were the children of Holocaust survivors. She stated that she didn’t really know then, just felt that there was “something secret or a little scary.” She saw a tattoo on the wrist of a friend’s mother for the first time when she was in the second grade but she did not grasp its significance until she was in the sixth grade.
Diane explained to me that both her parents had grown up in New Orleans. Her father had grown up very impoverished after his father died when he was two years old. He spent the last year or two of high school in Boston with his Uncle Murray, who took it upon himself to assist with the education of his brother’s children. Uncle Murray helped him to apply to Tulane for his undergraduate coursework and financed his studies. Diane’s mother, Ruth Esther Gottesman, attended Newcomb College, where she earned a degree in sociology. She and Diane’s father met while in college and got married in New Orleans.
Diane’s paternal grandparents were from the same small town near Kiev and came to the US through the port of Baltimore. Her father tended not to talk about the stories he had heard about life in Russia but he did say that his father had fled conscription, a common practice in that era. Her maternal grandmother had fled pogroms in Odessa and arrived in the US at age nine. Her maternal grandfather’s family had already been in New Orleans for several generations after emigrating from Germany. Diane recalls hearing stories about the pogroms in Russia, mostly from her maternal grandmother. These were stories of survival, such as nearly smothering the baby while hiding in the hay and trying to keep the infant quiet. She remembers that her grandmother’s tone seemed very matter-of-fact to her, given the horror of the stories, but toward the end of her life her grandmother cried when relating the tales.
In high school at Newman Diane had immersed herself in East Asian Studies with Mr. MacKenzie and fell in love with the field. She continued her passion by majoring in East Asian Studies and Japanese at the University of Colorado with a goal of becoming a diplomat and working for the State Department. Not knowing exactly what she wanted to study after college, she took the GREs and traveled for two years. She lived on a Kibbutz in Israel and studied Hebrew. She traveled through India and Africa and then back to Israel. She was lucky to be in Israel during relative peacetime in between the June 1967 war and the Yom Kippur war of 1973, and she considered living there permanently but had difficulty both with learning Hebrew and enduring the constant air raid drills.
She credits her time at the Kibbutz, however, with defining her career choice. While there, she was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer in the “gan” (Hebrew for garden), where the young children lived and slept. Not being formally trained in education or childcare, she was assigned the job of polishing the children’s shoes, which she described as “cute little boots.” There was one little girl, Batya, age two, who didn’t speak and who spent her naptime watching with big expressive brown eyes as Diane polished the shoes. When finished with her shoe polishing task, Diane would take Batya by the hand and lead her to her Morah (female teacher), saying, “Come on, Batya.” After a couple of weeks, when taking Batya by the hand, Diane was surprised to hear her say, “Come on.” Diane does not recall whether Batya’s silence was due to shyness or language delay, but it was at that moment that Diane decided to study language acquisition in children.
When Diane returned to New Orleans, her mother, who had run the nursery school at the Jewish Community Center for many years and had earned a master’s degree in early childhood education at Tulane, let her know about a new master’s program in Tulane. This interdisciplinary program integrated both psychology and education in a course of study leading to a M.Ed. in Early Childhood Education. Diane emphasized special education, meaning teaching children who are developmentally different, including children with autism and varying disabilities. The examples of Diane’s creativity will not be photographs that we can see; they will be stories of the children she helped to acquire language, and you will have to create the images in your mind.
Diane explained that she always taught utilizing a therapeutic model. She also worked as a parent educator at The Parent Center at Children’s Hospital. Among her areas of expertise was grant writing for comprehensive programs that integrated occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychology, and a parenting. She also had artists, musicians, drama experts, and ceramicists in her classroom both to help the children and to teach techniques to Diane. She described one student who screamed continually unless live flute music was playing; when she heard the live music and became quiet, Diane could then work with her to accomplish other developmental goals.
Unlike every other member of her family, including both of her parents and all three siblings, Diane did not become a psychotherapist. But very much like her psychiatrist father, who brought group therapy to New Orleans, she was a pioneer in preschool education in the state of Louisiana. In an interdisciplinary pilot program at Tulane involving both psychiatry and preschool education, she had the first “Non-Categorical Preschool Handicapped" class in Louisiana.
I wondered if anyone in our class would understand what that meant, so I asked Diane, who answered, “No one knew what that meant.” After some discussion I began to understand that the goal was to reach pre-school children before they were placed in discreet categories once they reached elementary school, such as emotional disturbed, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, autistic, or speech delayed. The idea was to address major problems when children were younger, in a critical developmental period, and more amenable to change. Diane described her work with several memorable students to give me examples of her approach.
Diane's Students at the Delgado Preschool
Diane had a four-year-old male student named “A” who was on the autism spectrum and did not speak except for echolalia. If you said, “What’s your name,” he said, “What’s your name?” “A” had taught himself to read, however, and Diane used that strength to create a technique to disrupt his echolalic speech. She would write a response to a question, such as his name, cover it up, ask the question, and quickly uncover the answer and have him read it before he could echo the question. Spontaneous speech is still effortful for him, but he became able to engage in conversation. Now in his 40s, he is a successful graphic artist. And he calls Diane, “Diane Cohen, Diane Cohen,” with great affection.
Diane described a three-and-a-half year-old beautiful little girl student named “M” who had curly blonde hair. She had no speech and kept a pacifier in her mouth all day long. Diane’s intervention was to remove the pacifier, and when she did, the child went through all the developmental stages of language acquisition in two months, starting with, “Ba, ba, ba,” and progressing to two-word utterances. “M” was in Diane’s class until age five-and-a-half, at which time her language functioning was completely normal. There had been nothing wrong with her; her speech delay was environmental induced. Diane also worked with the girl's mother to treat “M” in developmentally appropriate ways.
She had a three-year-old male student named “G” who had no speech but made “whoop” noises as his basic sound. “G” was also a whiz at Legos. One day Diane was watching TV with her younger brother and had an epiphany; those “whoop” sounds were from Star Trek. They were the sounds of the Starship Enterprise at warp speed, and those Lego designs were starships from the program. Knowing where his sounds and designs were coming from formed the basis for communication with "G."
Diane was also very far ahead of her time in starting her own school, together with Mary Latter, where typically developing children were taught together with atypical children, also called “reverse mainstreaming.” Mary Latter had just moved to Mandeville and was disappointed in the preschool options available in St. Tammany Parrish for her two young children so Mary and Diane founded a preschool of their own. Diane found that the variety of children placed together was very helpful for both groups. The typically developing children very quickly developed compassion for the disabled children, and the atypical children found terrific role models in the typical group. The school lasted for about four years, by which time St. Tammany Paris was providing other preschool options.
At one point Diane took a one-year leave from her preschool position in order to teach in an Allied Health Program at Louisiana State University at New Orleans. Once again in a multidisciplinary setting, Diane participated in LSU’s Therapeutic Nursery School, incorporating behavioral modification for development, play therapy, sign language, and melodic intonation techniques for language acquisition. When Diane’s daughter Eva was nine, Diane left teaching in the public school system, and began teaching early childhood education at Delgado Community College, where she shared her years of experience. She remained there until her retirement.
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Diane and a potential student at Delgado Discovery Day, where she hoped to attract students to their degree program in "Early Childhood Teaching."
I knew that Diane’s father, Alvin Cohen, MD, was a psychiatrist who had been trained at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, DC. In fact, Diane was born at Walter Reed. Dr. Cohen had finished his first semester of medical school at Tulane University when the US entered World War II and all medical school students were immediately enlisted in the military. The war was over by the time Dr. Cohen finished his residency training so he never went overseas during World War II. He felt grateful that his medical education and residency were sponsored by the US Army.
As a psychiatrist in the fifties and sixties, Dr. Cohen was unusual in not adopting a psychoanalytic approach to psychotherapy. He was eclectic and described himself as relational therapist. He studied Gestalt therapy, and he brought group therapy to New Orleans. Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt therapy, would stay at the Cohen home, and Diane described him as “full of himself.” Dr. Cohen was also unusual in seeing African-American patients, and he "got some flak for it." Diane’s mother, at around age sixty, obtained her MSW at Tulane and begun working as a psychotherapist as well. While the two once worked together as co-therapists for a couple’s therapy group, Ruth mostly worked with children and sometimes with their parents.
In the seventies, Diane’s parents began going to Esalen Institute in California, where the humanist movement in psychotherapy was flourishing. She reported that they were always “very mellow” when they returned. Once when they were away at Esalen, Diane and her older sister gave a party and someone punched a hole in a door (no one in our class of course), and she and Diane were very appreciative of their parents’ mellow response upon their return.
Dr. Cohen was very active his entire life and worked as a psychiatrist until a few days before his death in his late eighties. When he lost his office in Katrina, he rented a new one. The landlord wanted a three-year-lease, to which Dr. Cohen said, “What?! I’m 86 years old. At my age, I don’t even buy green bananas because I may not live to see them ripen, and you want a lease?” He began private acting lessons at age 87 just prior to this death in 2009.
Diane recalls her father’s sense of humor as one of his most important qualities, and I think she shares his sense of humor. In her career choice and service to New Orleans, she integrated the passions of both of her parents. She incorporated a therapeutic and scientific approach to understanding and teaching children with developmental disabilities, going back to Batya’s first words on the Kibbutz. Her father was an innovator in bringing group therapy to New Orleans, and Diane was an innovator in bringing therapeutic education for young children with disabilities to Louisiana. You can see Diane’s creativity in the interventions she selected for children who could not speak, where each treatment approach was tailored to that individual child. She was inclusive in her work with atypically developing children, and you can feel her compassion when she talks about the young people she helped.