Oral History Project - Retired Faculty
Dr. Carl Glickman
Scholar-in-Residence
Professor Emeritus
Educational Administration and Policy Studies Program
Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, & Policy
(1979-2001)
Interviewer: Philip Brown
Date: 19 October, 2007
Q: Tell me how you came to the College of Education at the University of Georgia.
A: I came to the University of Georgia in 1979 from Ohio State University. I had completed my doctoral degree at the University of Virginia and my first faculty position was at Ohio State, first on the Marion regional campus and then they moved me onto the main campus in Columbus. I was about to receive early promotion to Associate Professor and life was good. My wife, Sara and I and our young daughters were living out on a small farm about 45 miles from Columbus and we needed to think about whether we were going to stay in Ohio or seek another place. We liked Ohio State it was a great place to begin and build a career, but we ideally wanted to return to the Southeast at a university equivalent to the University of Virginia.
One day, I received a phone call from my major professor at Virginia who told me that there was a position he had looked at the year before in the Department of Curriculum and Supervision at the University of Georgia and he thought that this position would fit me nicely. The department of supervision was nationally known and I had done my doctorate in supervision and knew that some of the leading textbook authors were here at the University of Georgia. Sara and I decided to take a look at the position. I liked the job, we thought the town was great for raising children and farm land for our horses and sundry other animals was readily available and that is basically how I wound up here at the University of Georgia. This was 1979, the music scene in Athens was forming, my wife opened an ice cream parlor on College Street, the children enjoyed life here, the football team was a year away from their national championship, and the University was trying to attract more faculty from leading programs all across the country. It turned out to be the absolutely right choice for us and we have been here pretty much since then except for two years interlude in Texas
Q: Thinking about your career at UGA what are some of the things that stick out in your mind as a professor being here for a number of years?
A: It was a perfect match for my work because I came from the background of having been a very lively yet lonely school principal and wanted to use my university work to connect schools and principals on highly focused school improvement changes. I had been a school principal of two innovative schools in New Hampshire. Because of our non-traditional school work (non-graded, multidisciplinary, team teaching and activity centered), we were always in the midst of some type of controversy with parents and at times with other educators; trying to explain why the old structures of schools are not the best way to educate students.
I was very young and although we had impressive student results and received stat recognition as the one of the four best schools in the state, I felt really alone. I didn't know of many other schools or principals that were doing comparable work and basically we had no other schools to work with. I had decided to use any future university role to help teachers and principals and parents learn ways to connect to each other to improve education with the basic aims of being true to our common public purpose.
When I came to the University of Georgia, I found many colleagues who shared this belief. After all, we were working at a major land grant university so the idea that you should conduct research and service in real communities across the state is not a strange idea. And the idea that we as a College could develop collaborative work with each other was the spirit of new faculty with the support of many of our more experienced colleagues. Other colleagues in the College of Education and there were a lot of us who came at the same time in 1979. That was kind of the spirit of my years at UGA, from 1979 to the present, it was the perfect match for me. Twenty years later when the University recognized me with the University Professorship, it was a recognition of how central this mission is to everything we do at this place.
I have been here because everything that I have ever wanted to do professionally and personally I could do here and I found it always intellectually interesting. We built the League of Professional Schools from working with a few schools in 1988 to over 100 Georgia schools. We worked with schools in the Atlanta Project. We worked with schools in rural area in suburban and urban areas. We helped create the charter school legislation with the state Board of Education in the mid-1990s to free up public schools. We entered a partnership with the Foxfire program in Rabun County to help with the instructional part of democratic teaching and how to connect students to apply in school learning to solving real issues of their larger community.
UGA and the College has been a great place for me. I'm sure that there have been some blips on the way but what I remember most are all the wonderful colleagues at Georgia who shared this dream of what schools could be and have enriched me so much.
I was never a pure researcher in the sense of looking at students and teachers as subjects. My drive was around action research in working with teachers, students and parents about what actions can improve education for all children. We started with one school, Oglethorpe County High School. I just invited other faculty who wanted to come from the College to partner with this high school on improving their dropout rate. We met with the principal and the teachers and we started working out agendas about what kind of changes could go on. What should we be doing at the University? What would the school commit to do? What would we at the College commit to do and what would we learn to change about our own programs. This collaborative work was so helpful and productive, it later resulted in our expanding this work across the state.
Publications, books, staff development materials and large grants came out of this. We had a College-wide think-tank; open to everyone, every few months held in the Dean’s conference room about analyzing school issues of curriculum, assessment and policy. We would just put out a problem in front of the group and say “OK, this is what we are working on; anyone have any ideas?” The work with schools grew and became quite influential throughout the state and nation. We had an excellent relationship with the state superintendent and were involved in changing state policy legislative matters as a result of the work that we were doing in schools.
Q: Tell me more about the League of Professional Schools. How that came about and your role in it?
A: I and my doctoral students just started hanging around in some schools starting with Oglethorpe County High School. I had met the faculty and staff there. I cannot remember why… if I had done a workshop or a presentation or if it was someone in my class. I just don't remember. We were working with democracy and partnerships. Aubrey Finch was the principal there at Oglethorpe High. A year later, we began working at Fowler Drive Elementary in Athens which had a very high percentage of minority students and low-income students. We started working with the principal Sharon Dinero and the entire staff. And we attended planning retreats together to set goals. From the College, we had JoBeth Allen in Language Ed working with us. Barbara Lunsford, Frances Hensley and Lew Allen were part of that, too.
Oglethorpe County's results were dramatic. The school had reduced the dropout rate by more than 60 percent within a couple of years of working with us. Fowler Drive was cited as one of the state's prime examples of quality professional development. And they had indicators with what had improved with achievement. So these schools became somewhat famous within the state. Within another year, we worked with Morgan County Elementary School in Madison. So now, we had an elementary, a primary and a high school. We were really regarded as part of the schools, not consultants but colleagues. And the publicity and the newspaper and journal reports of the success being made by these schools attracted more schools to find out what was going on.
What was so different about our work was that it was collaborative and we insisted on a democratic process of decision-making within the schools where the principal would not have veto power. We set up action research studies with teachers and involved teachers in every aspect of decision-making. Georgia schools back then, and maybe still to a degree today, were very hierarchical and very bureaucratic. There were no school councils and teachers, students and parents had very little voice in decisions. All of that, in a way, was influenced by what later became known as the League of Professional Schools. I was brought in as a consultant to the governor on putting together the school council idea. We were invited by the State Board of Education to develop more flexible variances for schools. And then, President Jimmy Carter through UGA President Chuck Knapp, invited us to be a part of The Atlanta Project to work with 30 schools in inner city Atlanta.
So when it started to grow, we started to get national recognition, and then there were other networks of schools that were being established some of three, four, five years before us like the Coalition of Essential Schools that operated out of Brown University, the Accelerated Schools that worked out of Stanford. There were the Comer Schools out of New Haven.
Well, you know, you were in the course we took that look at comprehensive school reform models. And we just became really good partners. We sat on their boards. They helped us. We had this kind of exchange. And so we grew and we started getting grants. I don't think that we ever went after any big grant. The first few grants the people came to us. They looked at what we were doing and they said, “How can we help you.” So Bellsouth sent their two people who ran the Bellsouth Foundation. They had heard about us. And they came one day and visited the schools, walked around, and said you know we would like you to write a proposal. We would like to see this grow. And then out of that we wound up for a while operating on like a million dollars a year when we got as big as we did with the Woodruff Foundation. We were validated by the U.S. Department of Education.
For instance, Frances Hensley who later became director of our league later was the state director. And we were validated by the U.S. Department of Education so we got funding that way. We grew to be a pretty big operation and we have had a lot of people who have done their dissertations on the work. And the work continues now. We don't have the League anymore, but the partnership idea is still alive. I don't want to tribute myself to being the one who did this. For example, JoBeth Allen was wonderful and so were so many other colleagues. I could probably go through 25, 30, 35 people in the College. But I think I was part of the catalyst for saying this is a good idea and you can get promoted and tenured and be regarded as a reputable scholar, that this could be seen as scholarly work. That it is not segmented into service and it is not segmented into research. It is the integration of research and service.
Q: Now that we are entering 2008, the Centennial, what is your advice for new faculty members or entering graduate students?
A: The advice that I would have is don't stay isolated at this University. Don't be isolated by department. Don't be isolated by staying within your own interest group. This University has so much talent and there are so many different departments. It is not like everything is one. You can always find people who are interested in what you are interested in, but they are looking at it from a different way. So, my advice would be to attend meetings – that there are going to be people who are outside of who you normally would work with. Go to university-wide meetings on certain issues. Attend some of the lectures that are given here at the University. I wound up working with law professors. I wound up working with people in the business school. I worked with political scientists. I worked with the people in their student community area development. I worked with I don't know how many different hundreds of people and in a way it really helped. The different perspectives on common work have been invaluable to me.
I'm doing work in the last five or six years that people would have said 15 years ago that he is totally out of field. I'm on the campaign for the civic mission of schools that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor chairs. And my work in there really has to do with the whole issue around education, citizenship and democracy. Which you would think really belongs more in political science. A lot of my colleagues are political scientists. Prior to that, I worked with some here at the University.
I was really involved with the Millennium Commission that we had here in the College of Education that I co-chaired to set up the strategic plan for the next millennium. That was a big task. It takes an effort to use the expanse of this whole university. But I tell the same thing to graduate students. I'm sure that we are comparable to other places so it is not just the University of Georgia but I'm saying that when I see my career and when I see my writing and I can see where it has gone I can see why I've been in four different departments because my interests keep getting peaked or broadened through contacts with people that you would think that I would have nothing in common with.
So there were a number of art faculty that I become very close to who really helped me think through this whole community or freedom of expression. So I think that is my advice. Now, of course, it is easy for me to say that I because I have had my whole career here. The people who were in the department, they were very supportive of everything that I did. I was the youngest person at the time and then we hired some other young people and so we kind of became a close-knit group. And the same thing happened within the College. A number of us came at the same time so we are lifelong friends as a result of it.
So yea, you have to do your own work in your department and your own subject matter but what I'm saying is that you should always have an eye out for what else is out there and who is doing something that is interesting that you'd like to know more about. You have to put yourself in situations where that can come about.
Now for graduate students I say the same thing. I mean it sounds cliché, but at least half of your education has nothing to do with the coursework you are doing in your major. It happens to do with how your mind works and how you get involved intellectually with people in the halls, with people in formal meetings, with attending one of these University-wide lectures, by going over to the Georgia Art Museum and seeing what exhibits are showing, by going to the theatres or performances. It is the only time, in your life, that you are going to have this opportunity to avail yourself to some of these things within the University that makes the university a university. So, in a sense, you're going to the University of Georgia attending the College of Education but you are really part of the University of Georgia. So I think that is one set of advice.
The second set of advice which I think relates is … always try to integrate as much of your work as possible. See, when I teach I try to teach courses in areas that I myself am working on out in the field. So when I have students like yourself, I learn so much from their work, different projects and activities that other people were taking on that was kind of refueling me for some kind of work that I was in the midst of, either in writing or in actually developing legislation or policy.
I don't have enough time. I don't have enough hours in the day to have courses that are unrelated to what I am actually doing versus unrelated to books or publications or presentations that I am doing. So I think in your class... Didn't I do this at the beginning? I was trying to develop a new presentation and what I always like to do when I am developing a new presentation is to let my colleagues as students just get at it and tell me where it makes sense where it is out of line. So I try to wrap everything into a whole with what I am doing. It makes life much more efficient.
Q: What advice would you have for an undergrad, preservice teacher. Maybe a junior?
A: Well I don' think that I am a good one to give advice (to them). I mean I've had undergraduate students. I taught the introductory course when I was in the social foundations department. And I used to teach in that big hall, and you know I would have 300 students in the class. And I tried to teach the class as a small class even though there were 300 students. But I don't know what to do with a junior because I didn't have that many juniors. They were basically freshmen and sophomores. By the time that you are a junior, you are already...I don't know...you are already in the line now of getting your experiences, beginning your practicum, your internships and then you student teach so... I don't know.
One of the greatest, most meaningful honors that I ever received was when undergraduate students gave me the award for influencing their lives and all I can think of it had to be an undergraduate course because that is all...I mean it had to be introductory undergraduate course because that was my only time when I have worked with undergraduates students.
Maybe what influenced them was that I try to have students take their own interests into the class and then punch it out. So we would start every class with music, for example, we had this big hall and I'd tell students to just bring in what you listened to and how it relates to the topic that we are doing in class. I had an eight o'clock class in Athens so it is kind of a tough undergraduate hour to have a class... but the students would always come over and tell me that they were listening to this or that and they would give me something. I would know some of their music but not much of it. And they explained it to me and I would say you know... as long as it is fairly clean.
So we would do country, we would do hip hop (laughter). They would walk in to the room and music would be blaring you know. And the students would have to explain why they selected that music and with what some of the topic was. I took the students on field trips (laughter). I took 300 students on a field trip one time. So I really don't know what advice to give a student other than (pause)... always be working, always find something everyday that you are going to be doing in your classroom that is really interesting to you… that you look forward to doing , that you know is yours. Maybe it’s something that you are doing with another teacher. It could be something that you want to spin off of a hobby.
What I tell people is that school is going to be a lot more interesting to kids if it is interesting to teachers so bring your interests in, find interests to talk with your colleagues about. Don't stay in your classroom. Find out what your colleagues are doing. When you need help the best professionals in the world are the people that ask for help. Ask for help, but always look forward to something every single day if it is interesting to you and sort of translate those interests to things that kids are interested in everyday. When you asked me that, I just finished this article where part of it has to do with the fact that we don't build on students' interest in schools… I was going to say anymore but I don't know how much we ever did before. It is when teachers explain to a kid generally why this is important to do they tell them that they are going to need it. You need these math skills. You are going to get tested on it. The course is important to have and so on… plus math is something that you are always going to use.
Most kids say they could care less. But a lot of kids don't want to go to school... That doesn't matter... A teacher explaining why a kid should want to do that work is not the same as if kids are actually involved in math and see how it is useful to them. So I just say the same thing. Teachers should be intellectually interesting I don't mean like cerebral theoretical pie in the sky but you should be thinking about it. It should be intellectually interesting and in sync – so should students – not every moment of every day of every hour but there should be something… some sort of magnet that draws teachers to want to teach, that draws students to want to learn.
Q: Could you describe what the field trip with 300 students looked like?
A: I was teaching Introduction to Foundations of Education and that is a pretty broad-based survey course so we looked at history, we looked at politics, we looked at legislation, we looked at current issues, we looked at changing demographics and all that. So I would have 300 students in this class and most of them don't have any sense of Athens as a community. I mean they know the University of Georgia and they know the places that you go out for restaurants and places that you go out to socialize and have a party but most of them are kind of oblivious that Athens really is much bigger than the University of Georgia. And so we were doing a session on culture...what was it...changing demographics... I don't know... Have you ever been to the J & J?
Q: No I have not.
A: Oh. Well, right outside of town on the way to Jefferson. There is the J&J Flea Market. It is an old-time market of produce and goods… of Sunday morning church services… of health needs… get your hair cut… different restaurants are located right in the market itself. There are little stands of fresh produce and every wave of immigrant or migrant who comes in here that's really the center of the weekend. You can get anything there and it's huge, I mean it's huge. So I realized that when I was teaching this course to my students. I was showing videos on the changing demographics I realized that most of these students had lived in pretty homogeneous communities and they were interested but I really didn't know how to relate it to them.
So I called someone in the Vice President's office about whether or not there was any money available to take students on a field trip and they did and had pockets of money for undergraduate field trips because, for one thing, it is a Saturday morning and they don't take classes on Saturday morning. I wanted to give them tickets where they could eat at one of the places there and I also had an observation form that I wanted them to use. So I explained it to whoever was the director of the program. I said I want to take them all on a field trip... I can't require it because it is on a Saturday but you know I wanted to do this. I want to ask them if they would be interested in going and if they could arrange carpool. I wasn't going to get buses because it is only about 10 miles from Athens. And so the person who was at the Vice President's office said that this was a great idea. This is exactly what we wanted these pockets of money to go to. So tell me how many students will be there and how much you will need for their food and I had them arrange their transportation
So, I told them like a few weeks before. Look, I got a great idea ... I said, “Do you want to go on a field trip on Saturday morning to the J & J?” And the students were great. They were really interested. They didn't all go but I told them if I had at least 75 percent go, they could use that in lieu of a class because they were giving up four hours of their Saturday. And if they didn't go then I’d give the people who couldn't go an alternative way so I'd say that we had about 250 students and they all had observation forms on which they would write a paragraph or two about their experience. I asked them to follow a family who was from a culture or community that was different from their own. Don't be a snoop, I told them, but watch where they shop, what they buy and anything else you could pick up that would raise questions about what else you would like to know about their child and his or her family if that kid was going to be in your classroom.
And then we met. We had certain location...it spreads out for acres... I mean it is a huge place... you should get out there this Saturday. They were just amazed because also there is some... I can't describe it to you… I mean the markets are like... There are a lot of African-American people there... There are a lot of white people... white country people there... There are a lot of Mexican-American people there... There are a lot of … sort of… I don't know… just regular people there. I mean my wife goes there every Saturday morning. It is just the scene you know… just a great mixture of people and it is really fascinating and this is Athens. Some of the people live outside of Athens but I'm saying these are families with kids who go to our schools. But anyhow I have had older graduates who have come over to me and hadn't seen me for six or seven years and they said you know I will never forget the field trip that we went on. They said that they never had a class where you know [you go on a field trip].
So I think that is part of it. I also think the other part of it is when I would stop class halfway through and have them give me feedback on how to make the class better for them in the next half. And they would actually fill out things confidentially. They would have a group leader who would record everything and give it back to me. I would go over their comments and see where things were consistent and put it up on an overhead. That was before we had PowerPoints. I would put it on an overhead in front of all of them and I would go through what they wanted me to change and explain what things we could change... Things that made sense but some things that I was not going to change for whatever reasons. But I explained why.
And I had a number of students in the evaluation who said that they had never had a professor in their entire time at the University who had ever asked them how we could improve their learning. Now, those are individual cases and I don't think that there is anything particularly brilliant about it. There are lots of people who do it as well and I learned it from someone else who taught large courses. But I think the whole idea is that they knew I cared about them a lot – even though there were 300 of them. And they knew that I even called people at home. If I saw someone who wasn't around for a couple of classes or they weren't doing really well in class I would call them on Sunday morning, just, you know, to see how they were. They just weren't used to it. They thought a big class had anonymity. You could kind of come and go and do what you wanted to and as long as you got the notes from somebody you could sleep or something like that. But what I tried to do was let them know that… I don't care where they are from or what their background is or how good of a student or whether they are not a good student, I am really interested in them and the reason that I am really interested in them is because they chose to go into education and they have chosen to have potentially an incredible influence on a lot of people for many, many years to come. And there is nothing that I can do that would be so significant and meaningful. But the one thing that I can do is to underscore how important education is and why I care so much about them.
I'm just so grateful to this university that I have had the opportunities to do some of these things. Sometimes you teach graduate students then you don't teach undergraduates or if you teach undergraduates then you don't teach graduate students but I have always found the University and the College as a place to stretch myself. And there are rules but I don't think that there is anything at this University that is not possible to do… that there is a way to figure out how to do it. That was the other thing that always appealed to me about the University of Georgia because we came out of being a very small regional somewhat parochial university and I think at the end of Davison’s era as president and then when Chuck Knapp came in this University changed immensely in terms of the recruiting of faculty, changes in students and becoming much more of a national university.
The downside of being a national university is that a national university can forget its roots at the state. But the good side of it for me was that we were breaking away from a lot of that tradition. So I actually found people to be terribly supportive of anything that one proposes that has a rationale as to why it would be good to do. And be able to do it. I often tell people... people who ask me why I didn't go somewhere else. I say why would I leave the University of Georgia. It is the place. It is my home. It is the place where I have had the opportunity to work with really great colleagues and we have been able to create things that maybe I could do some other place, but why? I mean, I like it here.
Q: Is there anything else that you would like to add about UGA and your experiences here as a faculty member?
A: What I think always has to be foremost in the College and the University is that we are the University of Georgia and we have a responsibility to all the residents and citizens of this state and the whole issue around diversity and access is a pertinent issue here at the University. I don't think that I have ever been prouder than when they renamed the admission building for Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes. They were the first black undergraduate students. I don't think there was a dry eye in the place when that occurred.
I just think that there are issues about how we always remember what we are supposed to be about and that we don't sell that mission out. That is always something that I have been very, very concerned about and is very much a part of me because my first teaching job was in an all-black school system in the South and we were the first white teachers there and my next year was the first year that schools were integrated. So I have seen that and I have a fondness for the South because I have seen all of the struggles and things we have gone through. And we are still not there but as long as people understand that it is really a struggle and that this University belongs to everybody, then we should make it more and more everyday.
Dr. Carl Glickman
Ed.D.,
Administration and Supervision University of Virginia
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