"Good news!" That was all he would reveal by telephone. The year was 1968. I was a finalist for a position as a lecturer, specializing in educational measurement. Days later, revisiting Bridgewater State College, I sat nervously in Dr. Clements' office, waiting for it to become official, that I had been selected for the job.
The Education Department Chairperson, however, chose first to return to a theme voiced by other BSC administrators who had interviewed me. Our college he (they) argued was first and foremost a teaching college. "Fundamentally our mission is to educate the many first-generation college students sent to us by folks who live nearby and who didn't go to college themselves. They fully expect us to teach their sons and daughters, to teach them well."
He closed: "We would expect you to carry on in this tradition. We think you'll become a first-rate teacher. A contract is available"
I signed immediately. Thirty-five years later, within two years of retirement, I think of Dr. Clements' words frequently. They remain relevant: Bridgewater State College is a "teaching college".
In my early years, I was influenced by a book, Teaching as a Performing Art (Saranson and Greene, Teachers College Press). To improve delivery in the classroom, I rehearsed every theatrical/teaching skill it featured. With time, I developed a reputation as a flamboyant lecturer, moving classes along briskly. Students could only guess at the untold hours spent behind the scenes, practicing for class.
Teaching as a Performing Art proved helpful, additionally, in helping education students become "red" in their (future) classrooms. Their goal, as I might have put it at the time, to "seduce" high school kids into paying attention to academics at the blackboard. I remember those years fondly.
Time change. Post-modern ideology seeped into teacher-training. Constructivism revolutionized education professors' views on teaching/learning. Clichés today, "sage on stage" morphed into "guide on the side". The era of cooperative learning was at hand. Extensive student to student interaction each class became the norm.
My dominant teacher-centered style had to be curbed. I had to step aside, to yield, to teach through projects and active learning. This transformation took years and brings us to the present.
These days, when meeting a new class at the start of a semester, I direct students to imagine the following:
Suppose you were employed by an advertising agency. Your boss directed you to get together with Harriet and Tom and construct a "catchy" radio jingle that would sell soap-suds. "Have that jingle on my desk in 72 hours and make it good!"
Students tell me that, if real, they would find the task challenging and would make every effort to do well. In turn, I explain that this imaginary episode illustrates how they will learn in the course. "You will work with 'Harriet and Tom' and others. Your jingles will be a series of demanding projects, relevant to the objectives of this course and your particular major (teaching specialty). Your team will place completed projects on my desk as we move through the semester. And make them 'good!' (Pause) Any questions?"
And that is how it goes. Seldom do my students gather in a single classroom. Instead they report to permanent teams of three to five members scattered in different rooms.
I visit each team, at least once each class. We consult, negotiate, speculate, modify, argue (politely) and deal with stress. In a word, we work!
The result? Students learn what they are supposed to in a hands-on, dynamic manner. "It's quite a ride!" one commented recently.
On March 25, 2003, Dr. Joanne Newcombe, then Chair of the Secondary Education and Professional Programs Department, visited one of my classes as part of this review. She gave me high ratings. She witnessed a sane, mature and upbeat class. Please see Figure 1.
Electronically wired BSC has made it possible for me to carry my quest for the "perfect" constructivist class to a new level. If Stage 1 involved learning how to manage multiple teams in several classrooms simultaneously during scheduled class, Stage 2 called for learning how to use Blackboard and my faculty webpage in substantive ways, to extend class far beyond traditional concepts of time and space.
The students, the teams, now have the technological capacity to interact, address and solve problems, and complete projects in "24/7" fashion. Potentially class never ends! Hundreds of messages travel through cyberspace. It is not unusual to log on to Blackboard late at night, any night, and detect recent or ongoing team activity. Figure 2 depicts Blackboard messages sent by seven teams in the first three weeks of a five-week education course I taught Summer, 2003.
Related to the above, my faculty webpage is dense and content-laden. It serves as a "textbook", of sorts.
Whole courses that I teach, module by module, are fully online and always accessible. My comments regarding last class, directions for the next one, even spontaneous "lectures", are posted routinely.
I am aware of several BSC faculty members and even one Stonehill College professor who, after discovering my webpage, have requested permission to use it as a model to develop theirs. Permission was granted.
Dr. Robert Fitzgibbons (Philosophy Department) and I edited Encounters in Education, a book of readings published by Harcourt Brace in 1998. Because the book was only "in process" during my last formal evaluation (promotion to professor), I deem it appropriate to discuss it briefly in these pages. Now dated, Encounters in Education found some currency for several years. Education professors in this country and Canada adopted it for their courses. A copy is enclosed.
However, escalating textbook costs and the on-rushing growth of the Internet, among other reasons, motivated us to convert a planned, second book of readings from conventional to electronic form and publish it ourselves. Thus Emerging Psychology came to being.
This is a comprehensive online book of readings, embellished with professionally-created graphics. Topical introductions, discussion questions and colorful anecdotal material were integrated with dramatic, useful websites and carefully selected full-text, psychological journal articles (available through Ebsco and Infotrac). Difficulty level was controlled to serve introductory psychology students at both college and high school levels. A printout is available.
Enthusiastically, Dr. Fitzgibbons and I promoted our Internet-based book of readings ourselves. We approached hundreds of college psychology professors and thousands of high school psychology teachers.
Many expressed interest. They found Emerging Psychology attractive, relevant, and developmentally appropriate for novice psychology students. But few adopted it.
Investigation revealed that most concluded their institutions lacked sufficient electronic infrastructure to support its use on a wide scale. They were responsible, they reported, for too many students and had at their disposal too few computers and printers. Furthermore, many questioned whether their students had reached the point in 2001 where they could (and would) locate and deal with the full-text material identified in the readings.
Foiled again! It is possible that Dr. Fitzgibbons and I were too far ahead of the times in pulling together Emerging Psychology. Perhaps we will try to market it again in a few years, when technology catches up. In the meantime, however, we fully intend to keep our day jobs!
Respectfully submitted,
Raymond ZuWallack