Innovator Vol. 35 No. 3 - Spring 05: Learning Partnerships
Return to contents Dean’s Note: On Engagement and Collaboration...
“we’re striving to become an engaged school of education, collaboratively working to address the real problems and issues in public education.”
When I became Dean of SOE, I took on the role knowing that the vision for the School’s future had been emerging for some time—in fact, a blueprint had been generated by my faculty colleagues and by SOE staff and students during the search process. What’s more, this template for our future was intimately tied to a larger, national vision for the role of educational research in professional practice and teacher education, a vision that had also been shaped with a great deal of input from our faculty, including David Cohen and Magdalene Lampert. An advisory report, “Recommendations Regarding Research Priorities,” developed by the National Academy of Education for the U. S. Department of Education (March 1999), provided the framework for my “job” talk. That report called for “Problem Solving Research and Development” that would “take on broad-based problems that are…critical and real for education… necessarily embedded in complex systems.” Such efforts require “shared development by researchers and practitioners, who can retain and respect the unique forms of expertise …that each brings to the table” (p. 32).
Six years later, I can say with confidence that we’ve become a School of Education that can enact that vision. We have recruited and hired faculty who not only share this vision, but who have also joined us in active leadership in pursuing this agenda. We’ve engaged in increasingly ambitious studies using quantitative and qualitative methods, such as Brian Rowan, David Cohen, and Deborah Ball’s Study of Instructional Improvement. We’ve constructed increasingly sophisticated models for problem-solving research and development, from the Center for Highly Interactive Classrooms, Curricula, and Computing in Education to the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, and most recently the Center for Proficiency in Teaching Mathematics. We’ve learned new lessons about sharing our understandings with the field and the larger public—lessons about vehicles of dissemination, barriers, and incentives for collaboration.
Our efforts in these areas derive from a vision of “engaged schools and colleges of education” conducting research that can become truly “useable knowledge.” Despite challenging political and economic conditions, this vision has not suffered. Instead, it has been further articulated by the National Research Council in documents and reports describing a “Strategic Education Research Partnership.” In addition, increasing numbers of Requests for Proposals call for collaborations and partnerships, and emphasize questions of scale and impact.
As higher education champions the vision of “an engaged university” working for the public good, we’re becoming an engaged school of education, working collaboratively to address the real problems and issues in public education. In fact, faculty in our higher education program, which continues to be ranked number one in the nation, are leaders in the national conversation about higher education as a public good. They’re pushing us all to think about the relationships between higher education and our primary and secondary education systems.
As part of our enactment of the vision, we’ve increased the number of scholars of color on our faculty, and we’ve created an atmosphere where the goals of social justice and equity are regarded with seriousness and are discussed openly. We’ve built better, increasingly reciprocal relationships with our colleagues in pre K-12 education, as well as with our colleagues in the disciplines across the University system and with the University’s central administration—relationships that have resulted in new projects, new visibility, and new respect—be they in the form of collegiate chairs, interdisciplinary partnerships for research, or enhanced academic programs for our students and future teachers.
This work has not been easy, especially in the face of a struggling state economy. There have been unanticipated obstacles, along with the expected challenges. Still, I remain committed to the vision of increasing synergy between educational research, professional practice, and teacher education. And I am even more certain than before that our future lies in this direction.
I appreciate the contributions you—faculty, staff, current students, alumni, community partners, and friends—have made as we strive to realize this vision. And I thank you for your support and good wishes as I return to my role as a teacher and researcher, as a proud member of the School of Education faculty.
-Karen Wixson
Published in the Spring 2005 edition of Innovator
