Being a Proud Academic Dinosaur: My Career in the Foundations of Education.

Introduction

From 1993 to 2002 I was a high school teacher of English in South Carolina. Due to a lack of relevancy of the material as presented by my instructors, I had little interest in the Foundations of Education through my entire bachelor’s degree, and most of my master’s. To me, there was no connection between what the bunch of dead White men discussed in my foundations texts and the hundreds of active, diverse teenagers I faced on a daily basis. Without having been taught to explicitly make the praxis connection between theory and practice, it was easy for me to dismiss thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, George Counts, or Theodore Brameld. Instead, I focused on what I had been trained to do: finding ways of making great literature relevant to my students, and finding ways of expanding the canon of what was considered great literature. I deemed my teaching successful when my students walked out of my room commenting that “they didn’t know Shakespeare could be ‘cool,'” or that “public speaking could be ‘fun.'” I didn’t notice that I was doing with literature what I was not doing with foundational material. At the end of my master’s program, I took two foundations courses that completely changed my outlook on the discipline as well as my career trajectory. I was fortunate enough to work with two professors who insisted on finding relevance between their foundational material and my teaching practice, effectively “hooking” me on Educational Foundations. For the first time, I saw that the foundational figures (Dewey, Counts, and Brameld) had relevance to my practice, and could inform my daily decision-making. I was making the paraxial connections I hitherto had not; for example, I was able to see that my use of the project method was not new, and that Willam Heard Kilpatrick had some suggestions that could improve my use. I understood that my self-definition of being “progressive” was very limited without an eye towards producing good citizens. Today I study and engage the foundations of education in both my scholarship and my teaching. In 20021 left my high school English classroom in South Carolina to work in a college of education in Wyoming, in which I am primarily engaged in teacher training at the undergraduate level. At the undergraduate level I teach both the introductory course, here called “Diversity and the Politics of Schooling,” and the pre-methods course, here called “Teacher as Practitioner.” I make a point in both courses to actively infuse historical perspectives through my presentations and required reading selections; I demand my students ground their thinking about schooling and their future practice historically in spite of the fact that such thinking is no longer required by national accrediting agencies. In this article, I share my narrative with Educational Foundations for the past thirty years. It spans from being an undergraduate pre-service educator in the 1980s, to being a master’s degree student and a doctoral student in Educational Foundations from the 1990s and early 2000s, to being a full-time faculty member in Educational Studies for the past twelve years. The narrative is a blend of historiography, storytelling, and autobiography. It explores how the study of Educational Foundations, particularly in teacher education, has been gradually but systematically pushed to the side in favor of more current, but less meaningful, study. Colleges of education today provide students with the latest information on what is considered current best practice, but as this is not grounded foundationally students never understand the “why” behind these practices, making such study less meaningful. Ultimately, my narrative is designed to serve as one means of informing current discussions on how to avoid Educational Foundations from becoming extinct in colleges and schools of education across the U.S. Earning the Degree In the 1980s, as an undergraduate pre-service teacher in New York State, out of the half-dozen required education courses, only one was in Foundations of Education.