A symposium hosted by the Center for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Education

 
Introduction
Differing Paradigms
Ecological Paradigm
A Personal Odyssey

J. Myron Atkin
Rodger W. Bybee
George DeBoer
Peter Dow
Marye Anne Fox
(John Goodlad)
Jeremy Kilpatrick
Glenda T. Lappan
Thomas T. Liao
F. James Rutherford

A Personal Odyssey

In proceeding, I am faced with a choice between addressing what research teaches us about a rather predictable cycle of school-centered ecological renewal or venturing into personal experience with it, a route that too readily verges on the unseemly. I choose the latter, primarily because it offers to serve my purpose more efficiently. I have been in and around the place called school as pupil, teacher, teacher of teachers, and inquirer for seventy years, and privileged for more than a decade to be part of one of those initiatives in renewal of the kind referred to above. The latter has served to bring into synthesis and perspective several lessons.

In 1985, a colleague and I came off a decade of studying school change and schools as functioning entities and joined another in creating at the University of Washington the Center for Educational Renewal committed to the conclusion that schools and the education of educators for them must be renewed simultaneously. A few months later, Education Week announced our creation of the National Network for Educational Renewal (NNER) consisting of ten school-university partnerships, each in a different state and each comprised of a university linked in potential collaboration with a clutch of school districts.

We brought to what turned out to be a first iteration of the NNER a carefully designed strategy based on lessons learned from relevant research, our own inquiry, and several years of experience with the school-university partnership we had created several years before in southern California. Some of these new partnerships made gratifying progress with the concept of simultaneous renewal, but the initiative as a whole suffered from being overly permissive in its expectations, among other shortcomings. It is painful to admit that we, like more innocent venturers into school improvement, carried into the NNER several naive assumptions, especially in regard to the "people" process. We assumed that those making the commitment to membership had carefully studied the mission statement and discussed its implications. We assumed the common understanding that "simultaneous renewal" means renewal for both sets of institutions. We underestimated the tendency of self-interest to dominate over the common good. We underestimated the degree to which people view change as for somebody else. We particularly underestimated the power and perversity of a major condition we were seeking to understand and remedy: the gulf between school and university cultures.

Meanwhile, we designed and conducted a study of teacher education that matched in comprehensiveness our earlier studies of schooling. The findings shook us: pieces of teacher education curricula scattered across rigidly separated entities on university campuses, loose connections with the schools providing student teaching, long-standing turf wars between schools of education and departments in the arts and sciences, low status of the teacher education enterprise, insufficient interest on the part of most arts and science departments to warrant serious consideration of what they were providing for the many future teachers in their classes, teacher education relegated to the periphery of importance in the top-ranked schools of education, no joining of the conditions of schools and the conditions of teacher education in reform reports on one or the other from 1890 to 1986. We perceived in what we found and reported in 1990 a moral imperative that simply cannot abide continued indifference in any quarter, especially that of the academy.

We asked all our NNER members to revisit their commitment in anticipation of a new iteration to be effected within eighteen months. There would be a revised, nonnegotiable agenda and a rigorous admissions process required of both new members and those from the first iteration seriously desiring to continue. The reconstituted NNER of today is deliberately maintained at 16 settings in 14 states (three of them comprising multiple institutions educating most of the school student population and most of the teachers in their respective states), embracing 34 colleges and universities, more than 100 school districts, over 400 partner or teaching schools, and thousands of individuals. It is among those renewal initiatives of national scope credited with some success, and the only one deliberately addressing schools and teacher education simultaneously. As before, the technical support we provide is made possible by private philanthropy (with the exception of one small grant from the NSF).

The NNER has grown increasingly robust since completion of the reorganization more than five years ago. (The 15th and 16th settings have since been added.) Two of the contributing factors loom large. The first is the complex agenda, nonnegotiable but open to many alternatives in its implementation to suit local circumstances. The second is an intensive leadership training program put into place a few months after the reorganization described was effected.

The agenda has provided, I think, a new and compelling educational narrative that simultaneously embraces school and university people, connects with their work, and elevates its professional and social significance well above the technical instrumentalism charted by business and political leaders for the past several decades. The agenda consists of a four-part mission and nineteen sets of necessary conditions stated as postulates. The language of justification identifies education as an inalienable right and emphasizes its public purpose: that of developing democratic character in and for a democratic surround.

The four-part mission sets two aims for schooling--enculturating the young in a social and political democracy and introducing them comprehensively to the human conversation--and adds two for teachers--caring pedagogy and moral stewardship. The nineteen postulates embrace necessary conditions from institutional commitment to student recruitment, to responsible faculty, to coherent curricula, to exemplary teaching schools, to supportive state policies. It is the mission that inspires and guides, the postulates that mark progress.

Not only must there be an agenda and the gathering of a critical mass of people and institutions around that agenda for there to be progress, it must be sufficiently complex to engender a continuing process of unpacking for meaning. Our leadership program is designed to ensure that there will be key actors in the schools and universities--both arts and sciences and education professors in the latter--who possess deep understanding and promote the unpacking of this agenda. Many of the more than one hundred leaders who have come through our program are now busy replicating it in their own settings. The principle of spreading the leadership and the conversation widely is at work.

We have, I believe, entered that dangerous stage where the easy way out beckons seductively: declare victory and the work done. One of the most formidable obstacles, predictable from our research, grows out of our nonnegotiable condition of tripartite collaboration among players in the partner schools, the colleges of education, and the arts and sciences departments, all as equal partners. Each of these groups would like to exercise control, not necessarily be active participants, and least of all do the work collaboratively. On the positive side, largely because of the tripartite character of the leadership program, the gulf between the culture of schooling and the culture of higher education has begun to fill up with conversation about common mission, shared commitment and responsibility, and especially the moral dimensions of teaching.

Academics who have become sufficiently immersed in our agenda to identify with the narrative tend to connect it to their professorial calling, their teaching, and their discipline. They frequently hesitate, however, to engage in the work as other than a service. Even though most of the undergraduate curriculum of future teachers is in the hands of professors in the arts and sciences and the students of these teachers will soon be in their classes, they are reluctant to identify with schools and teacher education. What we are asking of them in the simultaneous renewal of schooling and the education of teachers has not yet been institutionalized as part of their regular responsibility. Even in the schools of education of research-oriented universities, faculty members tend to regard involvement in school improvement and teacher education as endangering their careers.

This must be changed, whether the language of persuasion be that of moral responsibility or economic survival. We have asked the American Council of Learned Societies to assist us in seeking to legitimate the involvement of arts and sciences professors in producing better teachers and better schools as a career responsibility. Deans and department chairs such as Professor Leroy Hood of the University of Washington must become the future norm rather than the present rarity. And if he, as chairman of a department of molecular biotechnology, can set expectations for his colleagues to spend 5 percent or 10 percent of their time in such work, surely expectations for professors of education to spend up to 50 percent are not unreasonable.

A condition that seriously impedes school renewal was in part made by the academy and can be corrected only by the extensive inclusion of academics in the rescue crew. Many thousands of teachers are insufficiently prepared in the subjects they teach to take advantage more than cosmetically of the subject-oriented in-service workshops and institutes currently available to them. For many, the standards being articulated cannot be attached to daily teaching because, in their own learning, the organizing elements were never brought together to constitute the discipline: the ankle bones were never connected to the shin bone, and the shin bone to the knee bone.

The recent report of the National Research Council, From Analysis to Action, begins to provide some of the reasons and answers. I hope you will join us in seeking to find paths through the woods now blocking our way to the schools we must have. It is unlikely that we will find the way without you.

[Home] [Directories] [Publications] [Search] [Site Map] [About] [President's Corner] [Employment] [Browse] [Feedback]

 Copyright 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.