Stefan Szuman
Stefan Szuman (1889–1972) was an educator, psychologist and physician. His work marks the beginnings of developmental psychology at the Jagiellonian University. He received his doctorate on the basis of his dissertation “The Art of the Child. The Psychology of Children’s Drawing Creativity” (1927). After receiving his habilitation, he went on a research trip to Germany for the International Psychological Congress and to Switzerland, where he became a student at the J.J. Rousseau Institute.
In 1928, he established the Department of Educational Psychology at the Jagiellonian University. After the war, he directed pioneering research on child language development in the Faculty of Pedagogical Psychology at the Jagiellonian University. He also became the rector of the Higher School of Pedagogy in Krakow.
He had very broad scientific interests, which were reflected in numerous publications. He was the author of, among others: “On the purposes and uses of motion pictures in scientific psychological research” (1951), “The Development of the Child’s Orientation in Time” (1958), “The Development of the Child’s Orientation in the Structure and Activities of the Human and Animal Body” (1958), “On Attention. Activating and Shaping Students’ Attention in School Lessons” (1961), and “On Art and Aesthetic Education” (1969).
Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was strongly connected to the art community. With Witkacy, he experimented on states of consciousness, and with Jan Pouget, he created a cabaret.