At 11:31 a.m. on Monday, November 27, I slumped exhaustedly into a chair in the computer lab at the Bernice A. Ray Elementary School in Hanover. I was just over three hours into my solo week of student teaching, the culmination of Dartmouth's Elementary Teacher Preparation Program, and I was worn out.
My fifth graders had just gone out to recess, and I was checking BlitzMail, as I did on every day that I didn't have playground duty. I opened an interesting message from a friend of mine who is a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. She knew that I was student teaching and that I have been involved extensively in Ed. Department programs, like the Marshall Islands Teaching Internship last winter.
The grad student forwarded me a message from a professor in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department (or PBS, the new moniker for the psych department) that was sent to all of the PBS graduate students and the PBS faculty.
The first line caught me by surprise: "Hi. Kevin Dunbar and Laura Petitto are being interviewed later this week for positions in the Education Department. Both will be giving talks on Thursday at 3 pm and Friday at 10 am and I encourage you to attend." The Education Department, immensely popular among the student body, has been historically under fire at Dartmouth. Many undergraduates, myself included, were excited that last year the college voted to strengthen the Ed. Department by granting it two new tenure-track professorships. However, as I read on, last year's good news appeared to take a turn for the worse.
The message continued: "Laura conducts research on language development and sign language ... and Kevin is a cognitive scientist who has been studying how scientists come up with their ideas. Both talks should be of great interest to those of us in PBS." I wondered how two prospective professors whose background was undeniably more rooted in neuroscience than in education were being considered for a position in the Education Department.
Later, I read about Laura Petitto in the American Psychological Association (APA) Monitor. She had received a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship from the APA. Yet, the article appeared in the science section, not the education section of the APA journal. It also explained that Petitto's primary research over the last 20 years has focused on "discovering the biological mechanisms that determine how humans acquire language."
Recalling the words of the PBS professor: ("both talks should be of great interest to [those of us] in PBS"), I couldn't help but think that the talks, in terms of subject matter, are generally not of great interest to those of in Education. There are clearly educational implications to what she is researching but they do not appear to be her main focus. Nor does the APA seem to think so when they publish an article about her in the science section of its journal.
3:30 p.m. rolled around and I had survived my first day of my solo week! I rushed to Silsby and anxiously listened to my supervising professor's observations of my teaching. After going through this first day's triumphs and tribulations, we shared our dismay at the fact that neither of us could attend Dunbar and Petitto's talks due to our teaching obligations. Worse still, we had only learned of these talks that day, just slightly more than 72 hours before the first talk was to occur. And we had learned this primarily through the blitz I had received that very day.
The timing of these two talks also conflicted greatly with most every student's schedule because they were held on the first two days of reading period. The deanery and search committee realized this and scheduled a student Q & A session that unfortunately fell on the first two days of finals. Student turnout at the talks and the sessions was paltry at best.
Now, as I revisit the frenzy of the end of Fall Term in my head, I realize how bothersome this turn of events really is. The search process for new Education faculty seemed to effectively render students' input irrelevant (as it continues to do by not allowing a student to serve on the committee, a practice used by several larger departments including the English Department). Further, it seems like the bulk of the committee's efforts are directed towards hiring a professor who is primarily a scientist.
Ultimately, I do find it encouraging that the College is looking to strengthen and broaden the scope of the Ed. Department by looking at extraordinarily strong scientists as professorial candidates. However, the aforementioned turn of events discourages me from believing that the second of the two new professorships will be given to someone with stronger interests in the humanistic, interpersonal side of education. It seems only natural and logical that the other hire be someone with an extensive background in crucial issues in education like issues of equity in school conditions, urban education, and multicultural education. So I wait with a dual sense of restrained optimism and justified skepticism.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote, "The means are the end in the making." It seems beyond tragic that his saying has been proven true in this case. Still more tragic is that it is being proven true at the expense of the students and a department that doesn't deserve to be treated this way. No department does. Especially one that has armed me with phenomenal theoretical instruction and more than nine months (a full school year) of practical classroom experience and fieldwork.
I see no need to really editorialize on how the deanery and the search committee have handled this situation. The narrative above speaks for itself.
From the woefully under-resourced public schools in the Marshall Islands to the exceedingly well-resourced Ray School in Hanover (which rivals Dartmouth in its technological resources and quality of its faculty), the Education Department has gone above and beyond in preparing me to enter the workforce as an elementary school teacher. Future Dartmouth students, and worse yet, America's public schools, will suffer greatly if we are deprived of this quality of theoretical instruction, practical fieldwork and richness of experience that Ed. Department coursework has offered and hopefully will offer in years to come.
