Cuisenaire® Rods Come To America
A Reflection from Jeffrey Sellon, CEO (ret.), Cuisenaire Company of America
Spreading the Word
In 1953, Dr. Caleb Gattegno, a mathematics professor at the University of London,
visited Georges Cuisenaire. Dr. Gattegno realized that Cuisenaire’s rods
provided teachers with a means for making mathematics learner-centered and an
active, hands-on experience for every pupil. By agreement with Georges Cuisenaire,
Dr. Gattegno began to travel around the world informing educators about the benefits
of Cuisenaire Rods.
Dr. Gattegno’s new interest came to the attention of the members of
The Center for Integrative Education in New York City, a small private foundation
established in 1940 by Fritz Kunz. The Center invited Dr. Gattegno to the United
States to introduce this new learning tool. After several visits, Gattegno
offered Fritz Kunz the opportunity to represent Cuisenaire Rods in the United
States. As a result, in 1958, Kunz founded the Cuisenaire Company of America
and turned to his son, John, who had recently graduated from Harvard, to run
the new enterprise.
Over the next several years, Caleb Gattegno and John Kunz traveled across
the United States introducing Cuisenaire Rods to mathematics educators in school
districts, colleges, and universities. From the very beginning, there was a
great response to the materials. Here was, indeed, an innovative way to visualize
the comparative value of numbers to one another, and children eagerly used
the rods to grasp these relationships.
Personal Ties and a Rewarding Career
As a college student and neighbor of the Kunz family, I had the opportunity
to work during the summers of 1960 and 1961 as the entire shipping department
for the company. In those days, filling school orders required pulling together
the selection of a few dozen items the company offered, loading them onto
a handcart at the end of the day, and walking the cart two blocks to the
local Post Office, where each carton was stamped and shipped.
After college, I returned to the Cuisenaire Company as one of nine full-time
employees. In my absence, the demand for the rods had been pushed beyond our
manufacturing and supply abilities. In those days, Cuisenaire Rods were made
exclusively from wood that only grew at high elevations in the Austrian Alps
and dried for one year, and then cut, stained, and coated with a special finish
that was nontoxic and of the quality of fine furniture. We had to wait an entire
year after we ordered the rods before we received shipment!
For two years I worked under John Kunz’s tutelage, learning how important
it was to educate teachers about the underlying mathematics they teach and
about how the Cuisenaire Rods could be used to teach it. The more I learned
from him about the uses of the rods, the more excited I became about the materials
and about mathematics. It wasn’t long before I, too, joined John Kunz
and others in doing teacher workshops around the country.
Becoming Part of a Bigger Movement
This early Cuisenaire Company newsletter created by Mr. Sellon was mailed
three times a year to almost 100,000 educators. View
an excerpt
In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, more and more manipulative materials
were developed. Despite the back-to-basics movement in mathematics education
in the 1970s, manipulative materials continued to make their way into elementary
classrooms, and teachers were eager for in-service support to use these materials
effectively with their students. During the 10-year period of 1968–1978,
I presented workshops to more than 50,000 teachers, focusing primarily on Cuisenaire
Rods but also on the many other manipulatives now offered by the Company.
By the end of the 1970s, the Cuisenaire Company of America had over 40 employees
and had moved three times to find needed space. New manufacturing sources and
materials had solved the supply problem, but teachers were confused by the
push to use manipulatives while their basal texts had little or no illustration
of these many materials. That changed quite suddenly as a result of the 1983
Texas mathematics textbook adoption.
At an NCTM convention in Detroit, I was approached about the possibility of
including manipulative materials in the upcoming Texas adoption. As a
result, I wrote a proposal to all of the textbook companies that were submitting
for the adoption, offering them a way to comply with the Texas request. Even
though textbook money could not be used for the purchase of the manipulative
materials, those basal textbooks offering manipulatives and providing illustrations
of them in their texts represented over 90% of the textbooks adopted that year.
From then on, there was a substantial change in the national perception and
in the use of manipulatives for teaching mathematics.
Final Thoughts
Before retiring from Cuisenaire in 1995, I remember shipping a single order
to a school district that filled 20 trailer trucks—a far cry from my
first summer when I could put one day’s total orders on a handcart
and roll it to the Post Office. I believe that
the increased availability of manipulative materials, and a commitment to
teacher professional development, has improved mathematics teaching and learning
for all students. And that’s what Georges Cuisenaire taught us― and
what every educator really cares about.
Jeffrey B. Sellon
Cuisenaire Company of America, Retired CEO
