Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 2 | A Timeless University Trains Teachers for a New Era, page 3

A Historian Expands
Arts and Sciences Horizons
The one place in the University of Virginia where the impact of Teachers for a New Era has been even greater than in the School of Education is in the College of Arts and Sciences, says Daniel Fallon. And the person most responsible is the College’s visionary dean, Ed Ayers. Author and editor of nine books, one a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of numerous scholarship and teaching awards including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s 2003 National Professor of the Year, Ayers brings a historian’s broad perspective to the project. It is his, and the College’s, ambition to hold themselves to “the same high standard represented by the most knowledgeable primary or secondary educator,” he explained, by seeking to “contemplate and share knowledge that is as broad, diverse and intense as that suggested under ambitious headings such as “World History,” “World Literature” and “The Scientific Method.”

New approaches to learning such as Common Courses, funded by Teachers for a New Era, are helping to make that happen. In each course a team of faculty from various disciplines provides a 360-degree view of a subject as daunting as, say, “Designing Matter.” Termed a “collaborative learning experiment,” this course, which is open to all undergraduates, involves students in a quest to understand matter in all its forms: “Where does matter come from? How can it be manipulated, shaped, transformed, represented? How do human beings understand and interact with matter? If matter is only 5 percent of what exists, what makes up the remaining 95 percent of the universe?”

Clearly, there’s more than one path to solving these mysteries. In science-based seminars with a humanities spin on subjects from quantum physics to gene therapy to architecture, climate change and astronomy, students explore these questions across the disciplines, under the aegis of the coordinator, a chemistry professor. It’s a rare opportunity for majors in biology, chemistry, art, education, English, anthropology and other fields to interact and develop an awareness of how answers to these big questions may be influenced by one’s particular point of view. This and other Common Courses, which typically have enrollments of up to 300, represent the College’s greatest commitment to educating the future elementary or middle school teachers, whose necessary facility in moving among diverse kinds of knowledge can be seen as the embodiment of liberal learning.

“We ask teachers to do what we ourselves declare impossible,” said Ayers, “to synthesize a broad body of knowledge in a way that will be intrinsically useful. In creating Common Courses we are attempting to build a bridge, but admittedly, trying to craft something that mimics the classroom is very difficult.” Setting up a program that reaches across divisions is not easy for the university, the dean notes, because each department is accustomed to keeping its own house in order in its own way. “Even though the students and the faculty like these courses very much, there’s lots of machinery to be dealt with. That’s where the greatest challenge lies.” Big interdisciplinary efforts are hard to manage, according to Ayers, and without a single departmental home it’s a struggle to keep things running. In a large institution like a university “the forces of inertia are strong,” he noted, which requires “constantly making it happen.”

It is worth the effort for such a forward looking and hopeful program aimed at turning out “better teachers with better connections to their fields,” he believes. And UVA faculty have committed to an impressive roster of Common Courses extending beyond the term of the TNE grant:

“The Mind of the Artist,” a collaboration between a psychologist and historians of music and art;

“Freedom and Enlightenment of the South,” taught by a scholar with joint appointments in English and medicine, highlighting the historical study of teaching and learning;

“Arts and Cultures of the South,” a collaboration among art history and architecture faculty, encouraging students to engage artifacts associated with local culture, as practicing teachers frequently must do;

“Rural Poverty in Our Time,” taught in cooperation with the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies and requiring 20 hours volunteer work on some aspect of poverty;

“Food for Thought,” an examination of global nutrition issues by an economist and a biologist.

Another new TNE-inspired idea is the Counterpoint Seminar, designed to encourage students to think about issues of content and of delivery in relation to, rather than in isolation from, one another. Simply put, learning how to teach the content of a particular course becomes just as important as learning the course material. Counterpoint Seminars are linked to survey courses and are open to school of education students (who have already taken the survey course) as well as graduate students in arts and sciences.
Here’s how Counterpoint Seminars work: A student takes an English Literature survey course as a sophomore, for example. Later, usually as a senior, the same student takes the Counterpoint Seminar linked to that English Lit course, with the goal of determining the best way to teach its content to children in grades K-12. Counterpoint Seminars are led by advanced graduate students from the Curry School of Education and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences working in coordination with the faculty member teaching the related survey course.

The need for the Counterpoint approach is something dean Ed Ayers has witnessed firsthand. “I taught the required American History course,” he explained, “and paid no attention to the fact that many of my students were training to be teachers. On one occasion, graduate students who were teacher candidates were invited in to talk about textbooks in the context of the course. Twenty minutes into it I realized they’d be teaching in six months! The scales fell from my eyes and I had an epiphany about leveraging content knowledge, a notion we regularized with TNE support.”

Counterpoint Seminars have been offered in literature, history and astronomy. In response to future teachers’ most pressing needs, the latest round included world history—considered notoriously difficult to cover in college but urgently needed in K-12; child and adolescent psychology—a unique opportunity to adapt content preparation in a field future teachers often study; and foreign language—which is challenging given the wide variety of languages students are preparing to teach. Along with Common Courses, Counterpoint Seminars have been ranked highly in student evaluations and their enrollment has steadily increased. For teacher candidates these seminars develop strong ‘pedagogical content knowledge,’ a term used to desribe a teacher’s ability to transform academic content into teachable subject matter.

According to Ayers, the strength of the BA/MT program already in place at UVA was a big factor in being chosen for TNE funding,”It takes full advantage of a four-year liberal arts education,” he said, “with teacher education classes and practice teaching during the third year. It fit TNE quite well.” From the very first meeting in UVA’s historic Rotunda, Ayers saw Teachers for a New Era as “one of the most promising things that could happen here. My reaction was ‘Yes, yes, yes!’” he recalled. Having only recently been made dean after 26 years of teaching, and facing a state budget crisis, Ayers knew a good thing when he saw it.

Next page: It was the existing relationship between education and arts and sciences divisions that clinched the TNE deal, in Ayers’ view.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5