Retired C.W. Post Science Education Professor Nasrine Adibe Dies at Age 88

Dr. Nasrine Adibe, a pioneering educator and professor of science education at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University from 1969 to 1991, died Sept. 22, 2006.

Born in Istanbul in 1918, Dr. Adibe earned a B.S. from American University of Beirut, an M.A. from the University of Michigan and an Ed.D. from Teacher's College of Columbia University and became an internationally respected authority on creative and effective methods of teaching science. She developed innovative programs such as "Physical Science Minus Anxiety" for elementary school teachers and "Awareness of Changing Roles of Females and Males with Implications to Classroom Instruction," a highly popular course in the 1970s. Dr. Adibe changed some gender roles herself: In the 1950s, she became the first woman to teach in a coeducational college in Baghdad, Iraq and the first woman to hold an administrative position in the country's Ministry of Education.  

After retiring in 1993, Dr. Adibe won a Fulbright scholarship to share American instructional strategies and reforms with university students in Bahrain, an island nation off the coast of Saudi Arabia. "I believe that children need to be better prepared to survive in a world beset by technological and social problems," she said at the time. "While certain methods of teaching may work in the United States, those same methods of teaching science cannot be imported wholesale into a different culture." 

Posted: October 4, 2006