"The turning of one's soul" - Learning to teach for social justice: The Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education (1950-1964)

Teachers College Record

Volumn 108, Issue 7, 2006, Pages 1266-1295

  Rodgers, Carol R ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33745324932     PISSN: 01614681     EISSN: 14679620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9620.2006.00693.x     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Theodore Brameld, Toward a Reconstructed Philosophy of Education (New York; Hugh Holt & Co., 1955). Reconstructianist education was Brameld's term for his educational philosophy. Reconstructivist, as a term, was never used by Brameld or his disciples.
2. See Carol Rodgers, "Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking," Teachers College Record 104, No. 4 (2002): 842-66.
3. Transformational learning is a theoretical domain that is more recent than the Putney Graduate School itself, though its contemporary definitions are compatible with Morris Mitchell's use of the word. Jack Mezirow, a leader in the field of transformative learning, suggests that transformational learning involves the reconstruction of the sell' and its frames of reference, a process that entails critical reflection on the assumptions that comprise self and the knowledge that it accepts as true. "Transformation," he writes, "refers to a movement through time of reformulating reified structures of meaning by reconstructing dominant narratives" (19). These narratives necessarily often point to narratives of privilege. The process of transformation is therefore not limited to internal processes, but also involves taking autonomous action in the world for positive change-an "actualization of perspective." "[Transformational learning] demands that we be aware of how we come to our knowledge and as aware as we can be about the values that lead us to our perspectives. Cultural canon, socioeconomic structures, ideologies and beliefs about ourselves, and the practices they support often conspire to foster conformity and impede development of a sense of responsible agency" (8); Jack Mezirow & Associates, Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000).
4. Robert Kegan sees transformation as the movement of the self from subject to object, from being unconsciously "embedded" in a context to being able to see the self, context, and the assumptions that defines them objectively, and to act autonomously on that awareness; Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and, Process in Human Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
5. Alison Cook-Sather uses the metaphor of translation to understand the transformative nature of learning. She sees the self as an evolving entity, continuously constructed and reconstructed by the conscious aspect of self in response to the contexts and relationships within which that self operates; Alison Cook-Sather, Wien Education, Is Translation: Changing Metaphors, Changing Selves (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
6. David Kolb also sees the self as a work in "process," in which knowledge, and therefore the self, are continuously reconstructed through a process of reflection; David Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984).
7. From "Report to the Trustees: Putney Graduate School," for the Meeting, March 28, 1953, 6. The Mitchell papers, #3832 in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.
8. David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 270, 275, 276;
9. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 52.
10. David Cohen, "Practice and Policy: Notes on the History of Instruction," in American Teachers: Histories of a Professional at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: American Educational Research Association & Macmillan Publishers, 1989), 394, 398.
11. These "others" included colleagues of Mitchell's from Putney and Friends World College, the Putney town moderator when the school existed, an alumnus of New College at Columbia Teachers College where Mitchell taught, Putney School faculty, and Mitchell family members. See Carol Rodgers, "Morris Mitchell and The Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education, 1950-1964" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1998).
12. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Walking the Road: Race, Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2004).
13. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Walking the Road: Race, Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education, Ibid., 161.
14. Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Seabury Press, 1970). "Banking" models of education see teaching and learning as a matter of depositing information into a student's "empty" head, where it is presumably available for withdrawal at any time. Questions of whose knowledge and for what purposes go unexamined; the assumption is that once "deposited," the knowledge is available.
15. David Gruenewald, "The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place," Educational Researcher 32, No. 4 (2003): 3-12;
16. David Gruenewald, '"Teaching and Learning with Thoreau: Honoring Critique, Experimentation, Wholeness, and the Places Where We Live," Harvard Educational Review 72, No. 4 (2002): 515-41.
17. Gruenewald, "The Best of Both Worlds," 9.
18. See Rodgers, "Defining Reflection."
19. Linda Darling-Hammond, Jennifer French, and Silvia Paloma Garcia-Lopez, eds., Learning to Teach for Social Justice (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002);
20. Gloria Ladson-Billings, Crossing Over to Canaan (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001);
21. Sonia Nieto, "Placing Equity Front and Center: Some Thoughts on Transforming Teacher Education for a New Century," Journal of Teacher Education 51, No. 3 (2000),: 180-87;
22. Kathleen Weiler, "Teacher Education and Social Justice," Radical Teacher, Fall 2002, http://www.findarticles.eom/p/articles/ mi_m0JVP/is_2002_Fall/ai_92840302;
23. Daniel Liston and Kenneth Zeichner, Culture and Teaching (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996).
24. Carol Rodgers, "Reflection in Teacher Education: A Study of John Dewey's Theory and the Practice of Katharine Taylor and Lucy Sprague Mitchell" (unpublished qualifying paper, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1996).
25. The Mitchell papers, #3832 in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.
26. From Alice B. Mitchell's record of her children, September 3, 1899. Personal Collection of Alice Blachly.
27. Alice B. Mitchell's record of her children, 1899, Ibid.
28. Interview with Mitchell's niece, Alice Blachly, daughter of his sister, Mary Clifford, February, 1997.
29. This was probably a conflation that should have been St.-Amand-les-Eaux, a picturesque village with thermal baths, located in the département du Nord, not far from the places of battle.
30. Morris R. Mitchell (aka B. J. Chaffee), "Mine Own People," Atlantic Monthly 136, No. 4 (1925): 496-502.
31. Morris R. Mitchell (aka B. J. Chaffee), Atlantic Monthly, Ibid., 499.
32. Robert Littell, "Ellerbe Learns by Doing," Reader's Digest, June 1937, 39-41.
33. One assumes that, he was also in contact, with George Counts and Harold Rugg, both of whom were at Teachers College when Mitchell was there as a student, and later as a teacher at Columbia's experimental New College, though there is no evidence in the record of direct contact. There is also no evidence of contact between Mitchell and Rachel David DuBois, who was also at Teachers College during this period, although one wonders how they could not have crossed paths. DuBois, like Mitchell, was extremely interested in intercultural education and group relations, both across nations and between races at home. They were contemporaries at Teachers College.
34. Theodore Brameld, Ends and Means in Education (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950);
35. John L. Childs, Education and Morals (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1950/1967):
36. Isaac B. Berkson, The. Meal and the Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1958/1970). Brameld, Childs, and Berkson were the most ardent, voices of the reformulation of progressive education following the World War II;
37. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
38. Deborah B. McKay, "New Foundations," 2001, http://www.newfoundations.com/GALLERY/Brameld.html
39. After his 15 years at, PCS, Mitchell accepted a position as president of the newly founded Friends World College on Long Island, where he remained until his retirement in the late 1970s.
40. The Graduate School was located on a piece of property called Glen Maples. Many of its alumni still refer to the school by that name. In this article, I use the Graduate School and Glen Maplen interchangeably.
41. The Mitchell papers, #3832 in the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill. This was another source of friction between Mitchell and Hinton and the board.
42. From the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalog, (n.d.), 3, 4.
43. Interview with John Stevens, February 20, 1995.
44. From the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalog, (n.d.), p. 8.
45. From the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalog, Ibid., 1.
46. From the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalog, Ibid., 4.
47. The program had many different configurations, including a two-summer program and a January-September option, and probably graduated about 150 students. Because virtually no enrollment or graduation records were kept, it is hard to know precisely. In the end, the program was never accredited, a fact that caused its graduates some grief; several went on to complete degrees at other master's programs. In about 1953, the program divorced itself from the Putney School and was regarded by others as a noble experiment but a somewhat less-than-effective place to educate teachers for the classroom. When PGS was bought by Antioch College in 1965 and became Putney-Antioch, it dropped its strong emphasis on social justice and turned its sights back to pedagogy within the four walls of the classroom.
48. See Theodore Brameld, Ends and Means in Education.
49. Some of these evaluations were taped and are part of the historical record. In all cases, they were used to plan the next year's program.
50. See John Dewey, How We Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933);
51. and Rodgers, C., "Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking," Teachers College, Record 104, No. 4 (2002): 842-66.
52. Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalogue, (n.d.), p. 8.
53. The portfolios are now housed in the archives of the registrar's office at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They served as a significant archival source for this study.
54. Ibid., 14, 15.
55. Dewey defined education as "that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases [one's] ability to direct the course of subsequent experience." Dewey essentially defines education as a verb rather than a noun. In doing so, he has also given us a definition of learning. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1916), 74.
56. I borrow this framework-student, teacher, subject matter-from David Hawkins's classic article, "I, Thou, and It" which represents each element respectively. David Hawkins, "I, Thou, and It," The Informed Vision: Essays on Learning and Human Nature (New York: Algora Publishing, 2002).
57. Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education Catalog, (n.d.), 4.
58. "The Purposes and Principles and Hope of this School" (a report written for potential funders, June, 1958). The Mitchell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill.
59. The force of Mitchell's love was stressed by nearly everyone with whom I spoke. Two of the graduates I interviewed admitted to being learning disabled and referred to Mitchell's faith in their abilities and the hands-on learning of the program as turning points in their learning and their images of themselves as learners.
60. Under Mitchell, the Graduate School was never accredited.
61. Morris Mitchell to Happy and Jane Traum, January 31, 1964. Morris Mitchell papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
62. Of the eleven alumni I interviewed, five taught in K-12 public or private schools, three taught at the university level, two were political activists, and one became a reporter in education and then started her own arts-in-education foundation.
63. Interview with Ellen Mitchell, June 1996.
64. Interview with John Stevens, February 20, 1995.
65. Joyce Gammon, class of 1960, letter to Todd Bayer, May 29, 1968. From Gammon's letter to Todd Bayer in response to a May 3, 1968 request for information from alumni. Morris Mitchell papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
66. Arthur Meyer, Cumulative File, Entry, July 6, 1953.
67. John Stevens interview, February 20, 1995.
68. From Gustafson's letter to Todd Bayer in response to a May 3, 1968, request for information from alumni. Morris Mitchell papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
69. From the anecdotal data in the record, there appear to have been about 10 to 15 students each year, nearly always a mix of race, nationality, age, and gender, including many men taking advantage of the GI Bill who came with their families. Because there is no Graduate School alumni association or any ongoing documentation of what became of students after they graduated, finding alumni was an exercise in detective work. I was able to locate eleven in all during the year in which I did the research. These eleven former students represent nearly all the years during which PGS functioned.
70. These included five women and seven men; one Indian, one African American, two Swedes, and one Swiss; graduates of Hunter College, Bard College, Goddard College, Principia, the University of Chicago, McGill, Sarah Lawrence, Brooklyn College, the University of Basel, and Case Institute of Technology. All students were between the ages of 24 and 39.
71. Interview with Cynthia Parsons, March 1997.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. From the "Reports on the Southern Study Tour of school, community, and regional development, November 1 to December 8, 1956" (3).
75. Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and who sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, has popularly been portrayed as a lone, tired black woman who finally got fed up and took action. In fact, she had been to Highlander not two weeks before she took action in Montgomery. She had been trained there in nonviolent forms of protest and had an entire grassroots organized movement behind her, many of whom also had a Highlander background. Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
76. Tests requiring voters to be "literate" before they could vote were established by state governments and were among the group of laws known as Jim Crow laws designed to keep African Americans from being able to exercise their right to vote. Literacy tests often required black voters to perform absurd tasks like pronouncing fictitious words or reciting state capitals. Reciting the entire U.S. Constitution by heart was one of the more demeaning tests that existed as late as 1960.
77. The schools were initially run by black beauticians. Beauticians had a great deal of status in the African American communities of the South. They were generally educated, and their self-run, self-owned businesses were community hubs. Horton, The Long Haul.
78. Septima Clark was a key figure at Highlander. She was a black woman from the Sea Islands who was educated at Teachers College in the 1930s and later at Highlander. She worked tirelessly for Civil Rights and eventually helped Horton to direct the Center (Horton, The Long Haul),
79. Septima Clark, with Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986), 115.
80. As cited in Daniel Perlstein, "Minds Stayed on Freedom: Politics and Pedagogy in the African-American Freedom Struggle," American Educational Research Journal 39, no. 20 (2002): 249-77.
81. Horton, The Long Haul, 103. The approach described here is today a key aspect of the whole language/language experience approach to reading and writing.
82. Peter Terry, "The Sea Islands," Group Cumulative File, 1963-1964, 92. Personal collection, Todd Bayer.
83. J. Wooclhouse and C. Knapp, Place-based curriculum and instruction (2000), ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. EDO-RC-00-6.
84. Terry, "The Sea Islands," 92.
85. From the "Reports on the Southern Study Tour of School, Community, and Regional Development, November 1 to December 8, 1956," 10.
86. This taking off in the middle of things was characteristic of the Graduate School. The trip itself was chock-a-block full, with nearly every instant preplanned, but there also seemed to coexist an understanding that one could pursue personal interests.
87. Anne Fines, Cumulative File, "Reports on the Southern Study Tour, Nov. 1 to Dec. 8, 1956," 17. Antioch College Records, Yellow Springs, Ohio.
88. Hugh Corbin, e-mail correspondence with author, May 15, 1997.
89. Anne Fines, Cumulative File.
90. Anne Fines, Cumulative File, Ibid.
91. That Mitchell was able to call upon these people on such short notice is testimony to the fact that he seemed to know everybody. Students often commented that he had connections all over the place, particularly in his native South.
92. Cumulative File, "Reports on the Southern Study Tour, Nov. 1 to Dec. 8, 1956," 19. Antioch College Records, Yellow Springs, Ohio.
93. Anne Fines, "Evaluation of the TVA Study Tour, 1956," 4. Antioch College Records, Yellow Springs, Ohio.
94. From the "Reports on the Southern Study Tour of School, Community, and Regional Development, November 1 to December 8, 1956," 25, 26.
95. Reports on the Southern Study Tour of School, Community, and Regional Development, November 1 to December 8, 1956, Ibid., 26.
96. Kenneth Zeichner and Daniel Liston, Reflective. Teaching: An Introduction. (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996), 59.