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UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - An Habitual Vision of Greatness - April 23 1964 - Heidelberg
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director University of Maryland European Division
Heidelberg, 23 April 1964
"Schools for the Sixties" An Educators' Conference DEG [Dependents' Education Group].
AN HABITUAL VISION OF GREATNESS: Never Mind the Norms
I am abundantly aware this evening of my own treacherous ego, and I will tell you why. Ambassador McGhee should have been behind this rostrum and I should have had the chance to enjoy the meal just finished. But his affairs of State being what they are and my own affairs of School being a great deal less, combined with my faulty ego, got me off-guard, surrounded, and marched to the rostrum.
You see, when the Ambassador sent his regrets, this Dependents' Education Group set up a sort of military pincer movement in the most cold-blooded way. There was a preliminary call from high officials in the organization at a very early hour on the fatal day, to check if I was in my office and not yet quite alert. There was then another call from the top of the DEG. He engaged in a certain amount of flattery of course, after reminding me that I was coming to this banquet anyhow, and then he brought up his big ammunition. That very good peer in education suggested, as I recall the telephonic barrage, that I must surely have had experiences like this when speakers of stature and state pulled out.
Before I could bluff or delay, that DEG head, who knows his business, set up his flanking action. In a matter of seconds there were DEG men of high rank walking into my office, not hat in hand, but exuding confidence that overflowed into me as they sprung the trap. After all, with such stateside educators coming to speak at this conference, these sweet talkers said, DEG simply had to come up with an educator who occupied an important place in the academic universe. While my ego, which is usually down on its hands and knees, was rising to this clever bait, they, the persuaders, were laying on my desk literature and propaganda and sketches and books and outlines and other paraphernalia of a quantity and kind to build confidence that the preparation of this address would be only slightly more strenuous than nitpicking some ghost-written party-line declaration. I mumbled something non-committal about all this sounding "very interesting" -and they were gone!, reporting their conquest to their leader, while I sat there feeling very conquered indeed, aghast that the signing and sealing was all done, realizing all that was left, and left entirely to me, was the delivering.
I am here before you, then, paying the price of a treacherous ego, ready, I trust, to deliver.
I know now, very well, what your leader means when he tells you conferees that you are engaged in a "major educational endeavor," to use his own words. I want him to know, right now at the outset, that getting at all set for this delivery has been a "major educational endeavor" for me. My ego is battered right back down to its hands and knees; indeed it may be seeking cover under this table. It has not left me entirely stranded up here, I hope, but it has left me situated up here in the full flood of attention from those who know a "major educational endeavor" when they see one. I can only hope that mine will be recognized as such and, as such, will be in the spirit of this conference. That is to say, I stand here before you without the answers, but not without some questions. I have watched you today raise up some big question marks, some of which I may re-phrase in my own way. After just one day, fastened all over the conference walls, inscribed on conferees faces, in fact, looming up all over DEG are, it seems to me , some vital questions raised by some pretty vital questioners.
To be so singly placed In the center of attention at such a conference, with the air so full of Whats and Whys and Whens and Wheres, so filled with good interrogations about all the incoherencies that mess up education in these mid-sixties, incoherencies In planning for the rest of the sixties, is to be placed, somehow, in the dock, ready for the third degree raised to the tenth power. I can only assume anything I say will be questioned and probed and kicked around, and I hope my crumbling ego does not desert me altogether. I'm prepared at this moment to sell my soul for some safe platitudes, some lovely generalizations, some familiar incantations that may get me by with a minimum of damage from these probing, questioning, kicking educators. But this is a crowd, I have seen, quick to question the platitudes and generalizations and incantations that sometimes lull American educators and DEG educators, and there is no comfort in this method.
I might try selling my soul to a clever IBM machine, some genius computer that would punch out all the answers for you tonight, and you can adjourn the conference. That soul selling didn't work for Faust and it won't work in this instance for Daly, I know that. Where once human kind looked out over the rim of the future by finding the answers in the entrails of sheep, we may soon have elaborate rituals using the magic of computers to lead us out of chaos. But all I can ever see on those punch cards is scary, looming disaster. Over-population , over-aging, over-leisure, over-contaminating, over-killing. No fit statistics for a banquet speech.
There is then, no escaping to platitudes and incantations, and I should not, I guess, let my computer logic make us sick to our stomachs with anxiety . So if I intentionally or unintentionally lead with some platitudes, I realize it is like leading with my chin. If I get computer conscious here and there it is because I can't very well help myself in the mid-sixties. Also, I really feel those machines can, if given a proper reading, do more than create anxiety.
We know the early man probing those entrails was filled with anxiety too, about a mysterious plague, or a blighted crop, or a barren wife. We know that present man, with his irreconciled political systems, his danger of nuclear war, his certainy of over-population, must, like the early man, find his best hope not in magic but in new knowledge, in a better ordering of the knowledge he has, in the surer transmittal of knowledge to the next generation. Anxiety can be turned to calm concern and foresight and thoughtful questioning and productive controversy. That is what you have been about today. Whatever the computers say, they do not quite say, with all their dismaying digits, that it is yet doom's-day.
It isn't doom's-day in DEG, and neither is it the millenium in DEG. Computers and politics e both warned us that research, innovation, experimentation (labels lined up and used so freely among these specialists and conferees) are essential ingredients of any system worthy of being called education in the mid-sixties, just as much as reading, writing and (hold it!) "the new math" are standard ingredients. To insist, as I see you educators are insisting, that DEG is a system that has the responsibility, and certainly the opportunity, for research and innovation and experimentation, because it wants to be what a school should be in the sixties, 1S not to tarnish any brass hats or soil any academic vestments associated past or present with the outfit, is not to call DEG some kind of educational disaster area, is not to release some Pandora's box of muddled methods. Rather, this insistence is the essence of education as it should be practiced in all school systems. It is time to drive out oft-heard DEG incantations about "excellence" which have been, really, self-perpetuating noises about the orthodoxy and incipient mediocrity of a system satisfied to be somewhere amorphously above the national norm.
There is something insecure and defensive about a system that 1S chiefly unique because of the geographic enormity of its system. (What is it now? From Kansas City to New York . And come July 1? The world's most extensive, making the continental US seem meagre.)
There are other important dimensions of DEG which are unique and can be still more unique than your geography. The Grail of opportunity is stretched out to you, not a Pandora's box, when you emphasize and build upon that uniqueness, striving to make it produce unique Americans.
Let me point out some of these unique qualities in DEG which, 1n my opinion, give you the responsibility as well as the chance to create the unique American so desperately needed by our nation.
It sometimes seems to me you are not sufficiently conscious of your greatest blessing, a blessing few American school systems of any size can enjoy: here in DEG you do not have the horrors of delinquency, deprivation, and discrimination to overcome. The under-employed, illiterate parent, the terrible home, the slum life blights do not exist here. The bleeding cycles of poverty and despair, drop-out and unemployment, greater poverty and greater desperation, are unknown in DEG. That being so, how dare you take any undue pride in being able to be above a national norm. That being so, how dare you fail to soar and soar and soar to almost unpredictable academic heights.
Clark Kerr talks about his multi-versity in California. You in DEG have a multi-system of elementary and secondary education -a giant invention of the cold war. And here is another uniqueness that puts still unfulfilled promise right in your lap. Reason, at the outset of occupation and cold war times, would have kept young Americans at home, would have avoided a DEG like the educational hazard it seemed sure to be in those early days. But that reason did not prevail, and thus we are met today, and tomorrow, to further sort out this unreasonable (perhaps) but imperative and promising school system.
Your multi-system has staggering diversity to deal with. One room schools to giant plants comparable to major city systems. Tin huts to glass-encased emporiums of educational opulence. One teacher dealing in all disciplines at several grade levels to a corps of teachers each devoting himself to one or two clearly defined levels and specialties. Must this diversity be dreaded as a distressing dilemma or heralded as a glorious challenge to the system? Can't this diversity be recognized as a golden provision built into the system for piloting projects of all sorts through all sized schools and classes ( How nice to be faced with the necessity to keep a curriculum coherent throughout such diversity and to keep a curriculum dynamic throughout such diversity.
No similarly diverse system anywhere in the states is responsive to one superintendent and administration. No similar system can respond to innovation and experimentation in so many combinations, so many chances for checking results and validity.
This is not to suggest guinea-pigging the system into chaos. You have the professional leadership and professional poise to avoid any damage anywhere from a dynamic response to educational imperatives of the sixties. You have had and will continue to have the calming certifications of accrediting agencies, a sufficient laying on of hands to more than bless and console the individual youngster or parent, and, you always have that abovethe-norm graph to point to for protection.
So take the diversity of your multi-system, take the professional competence you have already attracted, and can annually attract into your administrative and teacher ranks, and go confidently on opening new frontiers in DEG. Without trepidation, explore and experiment for better curricula, better teaching systems and devices, better administrative directions throughout the diversity of your multi-system. Surely it seems obvious that if team teaching, for instance, has merit at Mannheim, where the teams may be structured into many rewarding combinations, a little school of two or four over-worked and over-extended teachers at an isolated spot will surely be a better little school by the one team combination available there. But this presumption needs rigorous checking, and it needs an understood philosophy behind it, and some very clear guide-lines on how to be about doing it.
The uniqueness of the system, then, free of the enervating cycles of poverty and despair, dynamically used to deploy young Americans, in one-room DEG schools and in DEG giant plants , and have those Americans emerge unique from all parts of a multisystem which used its diversity not as a blight, but as a blessing.
I have spoken of the reassurances built into your system by the professional competence of teachers and administrators attracted to the system. Here is another unique DEG advantage want to encourage you to properly exploit and protect.
Now and then I have read about dissatisfaction in those professional ranks, not concerning the glory of being teachers in Europe, but concerning pay raises, which seem to have been one thing in DEG falling short of certain national norms convenient to the disgruntled ones. That some even mailed a certain DOD official the pittance monthly increase as symbolic dissatisfaction showed spunk, I guess, added color to the controversy, and suggested that a shake-up or a show-down was looming.
I have something to do with a system that is hooked into and therefore reflects the budgeting postures of a state legislature. And because we deal over here with the various, it-seems-to-me unrelated branches of the serV1ce, the budgetary mood of just about every commander in Europe affects us in tormenting ways. Salaries and conditions of employment in our system, therefore, can also result in letters to high places, although I cannot ever recall the most pittance-raise being returned to the sender. (University types just cannot even afford such symbolism). Such displays of dissatisfaction in any system are often omens of professional downgrading, not necessarily imminent, but certain to come if too long ignored.
You see, top professionals in education know about the strengthening status of their calling, know America is at last showing signs of giving this great profession professional dignity and sustenance, know that professional accomplishment and advancement needs money to live and work and to study and restudy like an educator should, like any professional must . To keep, and to attract, top educators at all levels, we must be warned by rumbles about salary and status which portend professional downgrading.
I do not believe the GED-military community is about to let our status catch up with the teacher's status in Scotland, where the wife of the local teacher can expect the same deference and respect as the wife of the Brigadier General, (as lovely and mad as that thought really is) . But I do warn the community, as I annually warn my Maryland hierarchy, that the frayed old, wonderful old psychic-pay-check, which has always been the salvation of the poor teacher who drove a taxi to get enough groceries, has been a compensation always overworked, has always lost too many great teachers to this great profession. Scratch an educator and he will bleed. Starve him and he will go where he won't be hungry. Degrade him and he will seek dignity.
But even when we pay and treat the educator right, even when we give him Europe and all its glorious stimulations, we are short-changing him in the most serious way, wasting his valuable time and diminishing his future, especially if he is truly a good and professional person -if we in any way deny him what should be (and unfortunately is not) a common-place in any respectable much less unique -system of education; if we fail to give that professional person, teacher or administrator, the freedom and the facility to extend himself professionally. The freedom and the facility to extend himself professionally.
"Freedom to extend" is intended to suggest that there 1S some left-over time to think about the job he is doing, to plan a better job, time to study, to experiment, to innovate.
"Freedom to extend" suggests the right to think in new frames of reference, the right to find new ways to do things, the right to challenge all systems, all colleagues, all superiors.
"Freedom to extend" suggests the security of salary and status. There is no freedom if insecurity in salary and status is so troubling that professional energies and time are unduly consumed in trying to enlarge some minimal existence.
"Freedom to extend" suggests that all of us know there is no dichotomy between teaching and learning. The teacher who is a teacher knows is not teaching when he is no longer learning – learning about his subject, about his students, and about his ways of teaching. He needs the time to learn as well as to teach; and he needs the stimulation and the facility to use that time and use it well.
The "facility to extend" suggests the physical plant, the professional equipment, the non-professional assistance, the contact with colleagues, the conferences, the materials and the methods that are changing and up-dating all round him. Courses.
Any "facility to extend" is relative, of course. The differences in facility between New Trier high school on Chicago's north shore and the facility at the Bitburg high school up here beside the original Trier on the Mosel, may be great, but those differences are not so significant, I submit, if the professional at Old Trier knows he has professional support, professional equipment, professional activity and contacts -if not next to his elbow or just down the hall, as at New Trier, at least available to him within the system to which he is attached and to which he contributes. He is especially reassured as a professional if he senses the DEG facility is out to identify and encourage his good performance, that the DEG facility intends to extend his horizons as an educator, extend and emphasize his ingenuity, enlarge his contacts, keep him informed, keep him refreshed. That educator at Old Trier does have the "facility to extend" himself professionally, if DEG is half as serious as it sounded today about extending his horizons in all directions, and certainly far beyond the morning haze on the Hundsruck.
One educator made some Mr. Chips-like points one day by saying: "I teach because I am a teacher. It lS an ancient and honorable profession, and the only one where I would feel comfortable. For professional teachers are like saints in that they cannot help being what they are. " I am a (quote) educator who agrees it lS an ancient profession, but in American history only recently honorable. I would say resemblances to saints is rather coincidental and that professional educators desert the ranks with surprising impunity whenever the freedom and the facility for professional extension is seriously curtailed. We can most certainly help being what we are.
Keats spoke with great good wisdom of "the seldom-appearing Socrates." Those early Greeks could ill-afford to kill that precious man. Yet they did. We Americans can ill-afford to run-off or discourage the precious, seldom-appearing Socrates of today. Yet we do. In DEG. In Maryland. In all of America's South, in much of the rest of the USA, in Old Trier and even in New Trier.
With all of that I hope I have pointed up another precious uniqueness of DEG, the unique quality of your professionals, attracted by the built-in uniqueness of your system, especially its exotic geography. I hope I have pointed to danger if you too-complacently sing, as you are tempted to do in DEG, incantations about an above-norm recruiting good fortune at a time when good professionals are now recruited and retained only where there is abundant and well protected freedom and facility for professional extension.
Much of my argument thus far has been intended to add up, ideally speaking, to making all those involved with DEG, including all those types at Karlsruhe and in district offices, all teachers, all parents, and certainly all military from the cosmic eminence of DOD to the vital NCOIC in the office next to the local principal's, to make all these DEGers change the manifesto from "an habitual satisfaction in staying above the national norm" to "an habitual vision of greatness" with which to surround every teacher, administrator, and learner in the system. An habitual vision of greatness is what we need in DEG and throughout American education.
To get better at a "vision of greatness" calls, most of all, for a process of "breaking the fix." The fix has been taken on a national norm. Never mind the unique opportunities to break with the norm, to extend and enrich the fabric of DEG or of any established systems. You found the acceptable formula, you "fixed" the situation after the you had North Central's sanctification.
There need be no guerrilla warfare against change, against "breaking the fix”, from any segment of the DEG community. Can anyone seriously fear that these DEG professionals will be roaring off on academic bandwagons, hailing outrageous fads? I have seen far too much humility and responsibility to overcommit, to break one fix only to introduce another, to trust a single method, to swear by a given mystique. Surely any Every professional sitting here knows the advance of knowledge about the science of teaching and learning is almost as breathtakingly rapid and volatile as the advance of knowledge in the science of space physics.
Can any educator here doubt that there is already enough known about the conditions and methods of learning to double the productivity of our school years? In fact, any forecast of the world of tomorrow indicates a mere doubling of the effectiveness of our schools will be wholly inadequate. Ever since that dog went up in a sputnik we've had a kind of "hound of heaven" making us responsible to prove "whatever Ivan can do Johnny can do better." Well perhap
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Christmas Party 1963
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryChristmas Party 1963
You have noticed who is the MC. That is because he heard his main mission would be the leading of Christmas Carols. Don Totten loves this. He has been doing it every chance he can get-ever since he joined Maryland. You know, tradition has it that Christmas Carols all got started with St. Francis of Assizi. Well, the Italians may have their St. Francis of Assizi. We have our St. Donald of Schlierbach!
I was told yesterday that it was a tradition to have the Director say a few words of greeting at this traditional Christmas party. I doubt very much if the tradition really exists. But if it is my responsibility to do this (as well as my privilege) I fully intend to write the responsibility into my job description and get it on file in the Personnel Section. Maybe I can get my category up-graded. Nice thought. You see, I really thought I had gone as far as I can go in this outfit.
Thinking in terms of tradition in Christmas affairs, I discovered that the first Christmas card was made by a Bavarian named Louis Prang, made in Boston, after he went to the States.
I found that the misletoe tradition (you've noticed all that stuff hanging around the Comptroller's Office) goes back to the tradition of old Druid (Celtic) priestesses, or young ones, I don't really know, hanging up misletoe and then standing under it for purposes of prophesying something, standing under it until they got some sort of vision. Now, I guess our high priestess of the mistletoe is Doris Reisig. But I'm rather doubtful if what has been going on under our misletoe had or has much to do with prophecying, although there may be inspiration of sorts involved.
Further, in tradition, it seems that that Christmas tree goes back to an English missionary named Boniface who came to this wild country of Germany way back once and tried to get these wild Germans to quit worshipping the burning spruce tree. He conned them into decorating the spruce tree at Christmas time and shifted the worship a little. Then the tradition has it that Martin Luther is the first to use lighted candles on the Christmas tree -no doubt trying to burn down some Catholic church . Prince Albert, a German Prince who became Victoria's consort, is credited with taking the Christmas tree to England. The missionary cycle full circle. And German immigrants are credited with taking the tree to the States.
It is the tradition of the winter soltice, the return of light, the time of the year when the long winter nights begin to shorten, the time of the year when we no longer come to work in the dark and go home in the dark, therefore have to be increasingly careful as we approach the office building or leave the building because daylight will give us away to those beady eyes looking out of that fish bowl Comptroller's office over the entry-way.....It is the return of light which was picked up by the early Christians as the symbol for the birth of Christ , the light of the world.
To bring a bit of lasting light into the world of some handicapped children, we decided this year to dispense with exchanging gifts among ourselves and to take up a collection which was handsomely contributed to. This money will be given to the Wielandsaeim in Schliesbach , and we have asked that the money be used as needed for special happy occasions throughout the year, rather than just at Christmas time .
And now I turn this back to St. Donald of Schlierbach
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Dependents' Education Administrators Conference - May 21-22 1964 - Oslo
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director University of Maryland European Division
Oslo, 21-22 May 1964 Dependents' Education Administrators Conference
There's nothing in the world like a bunch of educators to use and over-use the word “EVALUATE”. Educators are the greatest in this exercise. And that is good, although I believe we often permit the exercise of “evaluation” itself to be an end in itself. Everything is somehow better if we just ”evaluate” what we are doing, and then we go right on doing it, somehow pleased with the act of “evaluation”.
Let's start by taking out a great big fat gloomy “evaluation” of American education I ran across the other day.
1. We have produced a generation of people who care so little for the outcome of the democratic process that only 60% exercise their franchise on election day.
2. We have produced a generation of people who have demonstrated, in numerous surveys made by Gallop and others, a pathetic knowledge of public affairs. One of them recently revealed that 20% of those interviewed could not identify the bill of rights, that part of the constitution which houses their basic human freedoms.
3. We have produced an adult population with eleven million functional illiterates, lacking even the minimum essentials of education necessary for responsible citizenship.
4. We have produced a US Congress that refuses to pass a bill which has for its purpose the teaching of these eleven million illiterates to read and write, in order that they may assume their role as functioning citizens.
5. We have produced an atmospheric attitude toward all education that makes it necessary for Congress to disguise an educational measure by calling it a national defense act in order to secure its passage.
6. We have produced a federal government that initiated financial support for vocational education a half century ago but which, as yet, has not appropriated one cent for the preparation of the individual for his political role as a citizen.
Every time we get too cocky about our accomplishments, and too sure of our democracy we might re-read this gloomy bit, I suppose, and add to it our record of segregation, McCarthyism, and Birchism, lawlessness, apathy, payola. Then, before we become too depressed, we should “evaluate” our nation in comparison with any other complex, more or less democratic nation on the face of the earth, or with our own nation at any past period of its history. There will be, if the “evaluation” has any objectivity, some clear signs of hope, some signs of progress in whipping illiteracy, even a few signs of constructive Congressional action to improve American education, at least during election years.
I would add, following my recent, more direct exposures to its set-up and personnel, that Dependents' Schools in Europe is out to “evaluate” its contribution to American education, not as a lip-service end in itself, but as a means of making Dependents' Schools a real instrument of hope. Your conferences and their purposes are, I have discovered, spirited, constructive things. And I know this conference is not to be a mere exercise in “evaluation”, staged in this lovely Nordic capital; it will be a conference of administrators that may be recorded in Dependents ' Schools history, perhaps, as conferences can be, first , as the Oslo Conference, and then, finally, as just Oslo. You know, in the way the wags of history do it: Yalta, Potsdam, Vienna, San Francisco.
Well, perhaps that's a bit much. But, at least in this year of forming the new DOD Dependents' Schools system in Europe, let's presume this Oslo Conference can be of such importance it can be referred to for a year or two in time as “Oslo”.
I was able fortunately to attend a great deal of the recent DEG conference of educators at Heidelberg in which the NEA Project on Instruction figured largely. It was a fascinating and useful conference, and I hope DEG manages to sponsor many more like it.
It was fascinating and useful to me in particular because I move in somewhat different orbit; I get out of touch with what is going on in elementary and secondary education -and like most college and university people I find myself condemning and fussing about the inadequacies of the teaching and curricula of the systems which feed into the universities. I can be very glib about this, and I am quite capable of forgetting that a large part of any criticism I might level comes home to roost. If the universities are not training good teachers, are not stimulating good research and developing good methods of learning subject matter and teaching principles, what do we, in fact, have a right to expect. I think, too, that when the universities are faced, as they are just now, with the great masses of young people who have the democratic right and the basic affluence to go on to college, prepared or not for the experience, we will have to take a hard, hard look at our own teaching, our own curricula, our own research into what should be taught, and how.
In a word: the Heidelberg conference was an experience in the contact and even the clash of ideas and experience which I wish we all had more often -the elementary, secondary, and university teacher and administrator. We tend to pull ourselves off in our own orbits, protect and justify our own little human worlds, and forget that what happens to Johnny in kindergarten has something very important to do with Johnny the post-doctorate. So it is, I suppose, that I find coming together with you, here or elsewhere, an important experience, an experience which certainly breaks me out of my own often myopic way of looking at the moon.
That Heidelberg conference was at times going on 1n another language. I busily read the books which go with the NEA project, but I was thoroughly startled to hear phrases and see them nodded to in understanding which were so much educational Greek to me. I had never before heard, for instance, the phrase, “vertical articulation”, and I scrambled around the best part of two days to get any idea of its meaning. I am not yet sure that I could define it.
But there were ideas and things going on in Heidelberg which vernacular and vocabulary could not hide from me, even after my long isolation from things elementary and secondary in this education world.
I learned that the elementary and secondary education world is on the make, at all levels. On the make to answer the challenge of America caught 1n a frightening situation 1n a changing world, an America somehow convinced most of the time that its real salvation is in better education. I saw educators who knew that the science of teaching, like the science of space physics, needs exploration, testing, and 1mmense horizons. I saw educators who knew that the greatest tragedy in our world today is not disparate beliefs and iron curtains and bamboo curtains, the greatest tragedy of the world today 1S illiteracy, semi-literacy, and the horrible fact that human potential is never sorted out and given the opportunity to realize its full human purpose.
I saw educators convinced that the American education system, and the DEG system has by no means found the best ways to educate the young it has, to utilize the teaching talent it has, to capitalize on the growing status of the teaching profession, to tap and channel the funds and resources and legislator which are promising to bring about an educational revolution such as the American system has never seen. These educators, I saw, were setting out to find better ways.
I saw educators who were determined to come together with other educators for exploration and conferences and consultant sessions, to stay abreast of the movements and life in the field; determined to see every district in the new DEG become a research and developmental center, with projects and plans, with a sense of innovation and dynamism, no longer afraid of being something more or less than conventional, middle-of-the-road, standard American. I believe I saw educators who are aware that this DEG is a system unique in its opportunities for dynamic growth and development, especially unique and fortunate because it does not have problems of segregation, of poverty, of illiterate parents, of underemployment and slums; rather it has a steady, similar heart-beat, diversified not by economic and social disparity, but diversified only by individual differences in the mental make-up and potential of each youngster enrolled.
I saw educators who, it seemed to me, were going to intensify their efforts, speaking of those marvelous and tormenting and life-saving individual differences, to find new and better means of dealing with intellectual maturity, of dealing with intellectual promise, remembering that chronological maturity does not do much for “vertical articulation” if “articulation” has anything to do with intellect.
I saw educators who would compare favorably with those at the Cape Kennedy school (Melbourne, I think it is called) who are trying to keep the miracles of the mind up with the miracles of the Cape and of Space around them. Oh, I suppose that school inherited some kids who inherited some genes which are exceptional. But that school, like some in DEG, started out in huts, using broom closets to give the exceptional kid a place to withdraw for private study and reading and enriching, never mind his age or chronological maturity.
I saw educators stirred up about non-graded school plans and team teaching and some other projects which are to be piloted in this system, piloted, I am confident, with caution and with professional poise. I heard no sounds of over-commitment, of absolutes, of “this is the millennium”.
I saw educators who I think are becoming more concerned with really rigorous intellectual training for academically talented youngsters, wherever you find them and whatever age; while at the same time I saw the same educators believing that while the intellectually talented get their intellectual sinews stretched as they should be stretched, the same school system, without arbitrary and affronting segregation by intellect, will give a meaningful stretch to those with less academic endowment.
I saw educators who are sure the American system, and the ~system, is in no need of becoming philosophically or otherwise in the French and British pattern where futures are irrevocably decided for each individual at 10 or 11 or 12 years of age. Our system can remain a system of “multiple chances” for the late comer, the late bloomer; but our system must, it seems to some, including me, accept with more philosophical and functional vigor Conant's argument that we can no longer, in the slightest degree, accede to the necessity for choosing between “elite” education for all children and universal “mediocrity”. We can have “elite” education for the intellectually “elite”, we can have an educational system that can find and encourage that “elite”, and that same system can be “elite” for the intellectually delayed, the less endowed, even intellectually denied student at the same time.
I saw educators talking about “Thursdaying”, a phrase someone said came from Prince Philip who goes “Thursdaying”; to change his pace from his royal family and royal duties. You never know where educators will borrow vernacular from next. I don't know what Prince Philip does on his Thursdays, probably plays polo; but I understand DEG is determined to come up with at least half a Thursday for thinking, research, quiet planning, reading, contemplation. Not polo or another trip into the countryside. But mental and professional rehabilitation. Wonderful.
In the same “Thursdaying” vein, I heard talk about fewer contact hours with pupils in the classroom and more release hours for getting ready for that pupil contact. More supervision. Also wonderful. I might interject a comment and caution about this “Thursdaying” point. The “Thursdaying” impulse has in some university circles grown into a mixed blessing. Great research and scholarship has certainly resulted from releasing the university teacher from too much contact time in the classroom. It has also so isolated him from students and classrooms that the dichotomy between teaching and research has become enormous, and the teaching has suffered. A great teacher, who may or may not be writing books or doing research, is often exposed to students in university classrooms 9 or 6 or even as little as three hours a week. If the present trend goes much farther in university circles, we had better hasten the day when teaching will be done by machines, or when learning is hypnotically or intravenously injected into the students who have long since lost human contact with the professional teacher. As long as you keep the major emphasis on good teaching, as long as you see to it that salary and status are related first, last, and continuously to superior teaching, however, your “Thursdaying” can only payoff.
I saw educators who startled and disturbed me with a dichotomy tossed around freely among them that relates to the dichotomy I just mentioned (teaching vs. scholarship). I kept hearing talk about educators being different from teachers being different from academic people, and I got all confused, and a little worried. I suppose of all of those possibilities (and I guess I wish I could honestly lay some claim to each), I like the word “educator” least and use it most. I realize I, like most of you, cannot claim to do much teaching, all caught up as I am in administration, and my scholarship and academic research is far from noteworthy . Still, I do not like this dichotomizing. We are, are we not, in the academic world, and however we arrange or use our separate talents, we should not fail to have some familiarity, even as administrators, with things academic, with research, with an academic discipline, and especially we should not be separate from teaching and teachers.
All this separation and dichotomizing is, I feel, as dangerous in its way as saying that you can dichotomize teaching and learning. There is no teaching when the teacher ceases to learn, we will all agree to that, when a teacher ceases to learn about subject matter and teaching and about himself and about his students.
There are, it is too true, too many educators in our system, and the system and the educators are jointly to blame, who are by no means academic people and by no means teachers. There are too many formula for advancement in school administration, too many curricula set up, which increases this dichotomizing of the educator and the teacher, the educator and the academic person. Thus it is that we can get completely side-tracked from any discreet academic discipline into the business of becoming better certified administrators, full of theory about high school or junior high or elementary classrooms and buildings, and devoid of the competence to be in that classroom as a teacher.
It is, I think, dangerous to let this be carried to the extremes which we have seen in the last 25 or 30 years. It is dangerous, I think, to have administrators who have no love for a given discipline other than administration (if that is half the discipline some of us let it become), dangerous to have administrators who cannot appreciate the trials and triumphs of the English or Physics or Social Studies teacher because he has had too little similar experience, or has had it so long ago, so many long, dreary administrative education credits and degrees ago.
I think that we administrators and our separation from or exclusion of discreet disciplines of learning have been in a good part to blame for the fact that far too many good teachers in our classrooms are lacking in academic, specific training in subject areas. We are partly to blame that they are over-loaded and still over-loading in education courses which have become too often the end rather than the means of teaching.
We must, I feel, stop some of this dichotomizing, and we must certainly stop the idea that a professional educator is not a scholar or a teacher. For this grows into a sickness would call education-itis, and that sickness has brought and is bringing very sharp reaction in many quarters; some reactions shrill and extreme, but still compelling, such as those of Admiral Rickover; others majestically confident and overwhelming, such as the almost drastic reaffirmation of subject area training for all teachers in California. It is easy to push over some of Richover's arguments because they are so extreme; it is not easy to argue away the California reaction to education-itis.
I saw educators at Heidelberg (to continue my reporting of impressions and reactions) determined to up-grade the whole system by up-grading the professionals in it while they are in it. I think you have a marvelous opportunity before you now with this attitude in Dependents' Schools to get yourself and your teachers intellectually enriched and technically enriched -and there I go seeming to set up another dichotomy.
Well, I think there is a kind of dichotomy between intellectual preparation to teach and technical training to teach. There are great intellects totally lacking in the temperament and/or the tools to teach. You have in your system those who are temperamentally and technically capable of superb teaching, I suspect, but who lack real depth in discipline, who could really teach Shakespeare, except that they, in fact, do not love and understand Shakespeare.
I believe DEG is really ready to embark on projects to increase the technical know-how of your teachers, ready to launch behavioral studies into human growth and into human learning. I know there is every likelihood that Maryland and Dependents’ Schools will jointly launch the Child Study project, the human development project for which Maryland is rather well known throughout the States. These projects, these courses, will add up good professional points among your teachers. Wonderful.
But DEG should be in the mood, and you should be in the mood too, to give points and recognition to the teacher -or administrator -who digs into the discreet discipline, who takes some language training, who takes a course in Soviet politics, who retreads in the New Math, who attends a science convention in Brussels, who takes a course in modern drama, or Renaissance painting. The impulse for setting up these opportunities, the encouragement of release time, of constructive “Thursdaying”, of permissive TDY, of tuition subsidy, these things are all just about to become more realized in the system. Especially, I hope there is to be a sharper recognition that subject matter is absolutely at the heart of teaching, and that the Dependents' Schools system is dynamic, only if the subject disciplines are being enriched and up-dated all the time .
I mentioned a love of Shakespeare. I am acutely aware, as a college administrator, of the greatest killer in our curriculum, the subject that never seems to be well taught: English. The high school student is supposed to have spent about 1/4 of his time learning English, but the newest study of English teachers shows that 1/3 of them did not major in English in college or in any related field. The majority of English teachers do not consider themselves well prepared to teach composition and oral skills; 90 per cent don't think they are prepared to teach reading. Almost half of them think they are not prepared to teach literature and language. (This is according to a Keppel release of a study by the National Council of Teachers of English, which you have probably seen.) On the elementary level it is even more dreary. Fewer than 10 per cent had a major in English. Only one in three elementary teachers was required to study American or English literature. Not one in five was required to study composition beyond the freshman year.
Is it any wonder that colleges believe the earlier levels fall down on the job, that Rickover screams, that California has a new look for teacher training which is more thoroughly subject oriented? I understand this article, which has an all too familiar ring, came out recently in a famous newspaper:
Indeed our principles are high, but our practice could stand serious overhauling. When I happen to hear teachers talking, I am distressed at their poor cultural background, that background of general education that makes a man a fully literate member of his society and his age. I ask myself whether such people can ever be inspired to dedicated service. What can they offer others? They probably sit up late, preparing for their classes from this section of the text to that one, just as painstakingly as their pupils do. It is as though they focused the beam on a class assignment for tomorrow; they have to learn it so that they can cope with the questions that will crop up.
But it is not the teachers' explanation of a textbook passage that constitutes teaching, but the learning he adds thereto, the scholarship he brings with him and passes on to his pupils, his personality and his background of culture. This is the teaching to be remembered.
The article did not appear in the New York Times and it was not from the pen of Rickover. It is a translation of a letter to the editor which appeared in Izvestia, the Moscow party line paper. So, I guess it is not just Johnny who doesn't always have the inspired, deeply prepared and cultured teacher; Ivan, too, is sometimes shortchanged by his system.
In addition to giving some, I hope coherent, structure to my remarks so far, I have let my impressions about Dependents' Schools at the recent Heidelberg conference serve to structure some of my own ideas and experience and convictions about education and educators.
I trust I won’t lose coherency by shifting to a new struct
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Dr. John C. LeBlanc - July 20 1966
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. John C. LeBlanc July 20, 1966
We hardly had time to fatten up this rat before he left the ship - the PSSC Maryland. PSSC stands for our greatest service to higher education - Prep School for Southern California. We prep them at all levels, as you know. Not only students, but teachers, administrators, directors of polution, deans, coordinators, the lot.
This effective teacher from Minneapolis out of Boston via behavioral science institutes and hypnotic séances , quietly but immediately joined the hard-core in-group of this administrative headquarters. He was so much at home in and with the hard-core that we frankly thought we had him, indefinitely.
And, in addition to his ease with the hard-core, we provided him with Jivani[SA1] , a paragon among pretty secretaries; we encouraged him to redecorate his office to suit his own behavioral needs, and now, only a whole year later, he has almost completed that exercise; we arranged the areas so that he had some of the easier advisers to work with, such as Al and Cor and Peggy and Banu, and he met that challenge with hypnotic ease and startling success; we gave him a full week of uninterrupted travel alone with-Dean Ehrensberger through some of the more exotic Hilton and BOQ suites of Europe. (We did notice that even his own relieving powers of self-hypnosis were badly frayed as the week ended and the director and his wife; seasoned by fifteen years of exposure to Big Daddy travel, appeared to buffer him.)
We provided certain added dimensions to his work to keep him involved and happy with us. There was the coffee corner with Carl Bock; we let him oversee the imaginative if not quite energetic and fully realized efforts of that other Bostonian, Bill Curley; we gave him a major role and memorable costumes for Faculty Monday. We really tried. But we went too far in one of the added dimensions: we asked him to make major speeches on excellence to organizations in need of speakers, and he got carried away by his own rhetoric. In one form or another he worked and reworked the theme: "The Pursuit of Excellence: A Time for Renewal." That title should have alerted us, I suppose. And what he said was a dead give-away. He was bound to leave us. In his oft-repeated theme he deplored the "cult of easiness" to which so many in our society are pledged. He deplored an "ease-oriented existence." (Please understand, I am quoting his words.) He deplored living in a situation where the "dominant ethic is to have fun." The philosophy, "never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today," he deplored, and as a hard-core member of our little society he certainly found out that that is a reasonable statement of Maryland's philosophy. His speech moved on on this very high plane to state that the "cult of easiness" is actually killing the “culture of excellence.” "We must face this fact, he said, and do something about it, and do something now." The last time he went through that glowing rhetoric was at Maryland's own Alpha Sigma Lambda banquet and, well, he had already done something about it. He had already talked to that other Maryland drop-out, I mean prepped-up, Gordon Conrad, and he had rededicated John Charles LeBlanc to the further pursuit of excellence. He sold out to the culture of excellence and all those lovely fringe benefits that USC puts with it.
He deplored the loss of "the arts of organizational renewal." He harped in that darn speech about "organizations having to renew themselves continuously." Well, thanks to him, and so many others in the last two years, I would like to hear about any organization which has so frequently had to renew, retrench, retrain, retread, revamp. He is doing his part, apart from speech making, to force our self-renewal.
This hypnotist, this hard-coreman, this speech-maker, this rat, is a great teacher, a natural administrator, executive, director, supervisor, colleague, and friend. We have been renewed by his presence and personality. We are organizationally more excellent than when he came. We will watch with friendly concern and confidence his further pursuit of excellence.
And we have here a drop-out case to carry around all his speeches on excellence and self-renewal
UMUC - Asian Division - Mason G Daly - Greetings - March 27 1960
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryGreetings: Dr. Mason G. Daly, Director
Far East Division
Commencement , 27 March 1960
Dignitaries
Faculty
Students
and Guests
The faculty of the Far East Division meets with students in classrooms at more than 45 locations in Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Guam. Only on this one day of the year do we feel the need for a centralized campus and a big auditorium.
We find the Kudan Kaikan, however, curiously appropriate for this American academic convocation in 1960, the centennial year of Japan-American diplomatic relations.
A former building on this spot served the Tokugawa government as the Barbarian Books Investigation Office, a place to censor western publications in a sealed-off Japan not yet visited by America’s Commodore Perry. The same building sorvad to house the first US Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris, during his long-delayed visit to Edo from Shimoda. And, on this corner of Tokyo, beside the Imperial moat, the great Tokyo University began.
It is fitting that this convocation has an historic setting rich with tradition, because these robed dignitaries and students draw upon hundreds of years of solemn European and American tradition for the regalia and ritual of this ceremony.
But change is also symbolized here today. Whereas a university once prided itself in being the quiet citadel of learning, designed to formally educate the few and the young, the modern university has been challenged to uphold its traditions and values and at the same time contribute dynamically to a society everywhere in cataclysmic change. There is more to be done than to pass on the accumulated knowledge of the past. The university must interpret the immediate present, it must experiment with and predict the future; it must be in the marketplace, at the space launching pad, at the labor forum, in the underdeveloped country, the refugee camp, merged into every sphere of human endeavor.
We may take some satisfaction in the fact that even this new peripatetic development is not without comforting tradition. The teaching orders of the Middle Ages went everywhere in the known world, carrying tradition, religion, culture. Also, in America we can recall the energy with which established universities spawned little teaching coteries and colleges on the western frontier as fast as new settlements were made. We do not expect to leave satellite universities strung out across the world because of Maryland 's present overseas activities. But we are surely demonstrating, as did the medieval scholar and the pioneer American, what is by now an accepted university maxim - that the university campus is not a close or a cloister, not the refuge of a few intellectual aristocrats, not separate from the rest of society.
There may be no medieval or pioneer precedent for one aspect of this event today: the alliance of the military and the civil academic. All but ten of these graduates are in one of the United States armed forces; the other ten are affiliated with these forces, either as employees or as dependents. Fifteen years ago the US military,made the baccalaureate degree the goal of its personnel, and began establishing many means by which its people could advance academically with civilian institutions.
Maryland is here at the invitation of these overseas commands, operating with complete academic autonomy, abiding by the same university regulations and requirements in Seoul or Taipei or Itazuke which apply at College Park, Maryland.
In this audience and on this stage are commanding officers from all over the Pacific and the Far East who are determined to make this academic objective part of the United States military tradition. In this audience are civilian education specialists, hired by these commands to promote and guide this objective, men and women through whom this university coordinates its program.
The military student receives tuition subsidy and command encouragement to develop knowledge and skills that are not military in nature, but are part of the intellectual development needed by an American in or out of uniform. No other military service in the history of the world has invested so much in developing the citizen soldier.
We are pleased to have so many Japanese university presidents and professors here today. Your highly literate people are making far greater demands upon your university facilities than American institutions ever faced. Your struggle to uphold tradition during a time of immense change and bursting expansion is one of the most noteworthy phenomenon in education today. You will, we trust, find this ceremony interesting, this off-campus activity both acceptable and challenging.
On behalf of the staff and faculty of the Far East Division, I congratulate these graduates; I warmly praise the civil and military education personnel for their assist ance to these graduates (and to the thousands of others who have studied with them during this last academic year); I applaud the families who have generously shared the off-duty time and energies of these graduates. And, I invite all of you, participants and guests, to take pleasure in this ceremony and in the reception which will follow
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Teachers Conference: The Great Hypocrisy of the Great Society - November 15 1965 - Wiesbaden
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryTeachers’ Conference
Wiesbaden
15 November 1965
Dr. Mason G. Daly
Director, European Division
University of Maryland
The Great Hypocrisy or the Great Society
-in your classrooms-
Let me begin with a quote that has been worn threadbare by speakers at teachers’ meetings for the past 18 months or so, with a quote that has stirred up some argument, argument never very heated really, because even those who disagree are afraid the man is dead right. Francis Keppel (ad you all know who he is and how he is struggling with orders and opportunities handed out by LBJ and the 89th “education Congress”) said”
“In a world that is closing in on the moon and Mars….we are still graduating functional illiterates from our classrooms.”
If you haven’t graduated them yet, I suspect some of you can identify a few potential functional illiterates in your best classrooms in Wiesbaden or Mainz or Bad Godesberg. An illiterate is unread, unlearned, unlettered, unemployable, and usually unhappy. It’s easy to function as an illiterate, certainly. Academic administrators, unhappy lot that they are, come close to being fully illiterate a lot of the time, and so do, for that matter, some teachers. We are employed, but we can hardly be accused of having or taking time to read or learn or write. Still, I guess we do sort of remember how to read, and we do profess to know something about the learning processes; but most of us will be straining our writing powers to get the Christmas cards mailed out. Given the time and a gathering like this, we might just generate a gnawing sense of guilt bout our own literacy-equipment, its initial model and its present state of repair. The Great Society struggling toward the moon and Mars, and toward domestic tranquility, and maybe even toward peaceful coexistence, seems to sense that the Great Hyprocisy has run its course, seems to see students and teachers for what they are – and that is something somehow less than adequate architects of the super-structure and super-civilization and super society which is visualized and legislated by that man recuperating down there in Texas.
Every time that ex-school-teacher president picks up a bushel of pens to sign another education act, he talks about his Great Society in phrases that can send waves of hope through our ranks, that can turn our conscience inward to what we are now, what we are now doing, and outward to what we can become and what we can set about doing. LBJ says, where all American and all American legislators can hear:
“I intend to offer more new proposals to improve the education of all Americans. And we are not going to stop until every child in this land can have all the education of the highest quality which his ambition and his mind can absorb.”
And while the pens are flashing, LBJ announces a program of fellowships for elementary and secondary teachers “so they can replenish their knowledge and improve their abilities.” He pledges his government’s support to the teachers of America to “bring all the tools of modern knowledge” to their tasks.
The National Science Foundation, which got started before LBJ and had to be cloaked in the guide of a national defense act to be respectable enough for earlier congresses to pass, has already made some of us more literate, more of what teachers should be, has already brought new resources and methods and means to classrooms of America. Now, right out in the open, with no hypocrisy to cloak it, we see a National Foundation of the Arts and Humanities passed into law and penned into the Great Society.
Keppel says he has been ordered, not just allowed, by Congress to spend a great sum of money, to be ready with grants to help schools with handicapped children and handicapped teachers, any kind of handicap, to reach into remote mountain schools and into neglected inner-slum schools, and I trust even into DOD schools. Ten million is his modest estimate of the deprived and aggrieved children who are undernourished of body and mind and opportunity, who are living in the Great Hypocrisy, and he easily shows that the hypocrisy includes unprepared and unpreparing teachers, includes rampant discriminat6ion about race and creed in teaching ranks as well as in student ranks, includes shoddy, “safe” textbooks. And on and on he goes, with statistics and horrors and hypocrisies that make the Great Society seem far more remote than Mars, seem quite beyond LBJ and big money and big bureaucracy, seem not really intended by fate to be [reality]. Like the 80 year-old lady who wrote to one of our scientists: “Dear Dr. von Braun, Why do we have to go to the moon? Why can’t we stay on this earth and watch television the way the good Lord intended.”
Well, when we are 80 years of age, confused by threats to our social security and our medicare of the day, as our future scientists plunge us into greater unknowns, we may have a right to sound petulant like…[last line cut off]
…all out, let us relax and enjoy life with our recently replaced liver or lung the way the good Lord intended. But in most respects we, those of us here this morning, are not quite 80 and we should have somewhat different responses to make to the tumult and the trepidation around us, we should be able to sort out our part in the present Great Hypocrisy and our part in the promised Great Society. And after it is all sorted out, perhaps we may finally know what the good Lord intended.
Every teacher sitting here this morning should know that the advent of knowledge about the science of teaching and learning is as breathtakingly rapid and volatile, and is just now garnering some of the same loyal press and headlines, as the advance of knowledge in the science of space physics. In some of your most despairing moments in the classroom, when you have certain proof that the human brain is a dreadful vacuum, you are not willing to grant that we are probably managing in our present fumbling science of teaching and learning to utilize about 2 to 5% of the human brain potential in our charges, and, dreadful thought, in ourselves. We must not labor those unproved percentages too long or too much. They seem somehow to deal in Evolution more than in modern science. To think that this cranium contains so much unused, untapped, uncircuited grey matter! Why can’t we hook up those electrodes better! What an enormous cheat! What a great hypocrisy!
Let’s not haggle too long over that brain disaster area, but let’s not doubt that there is right now enough known about the conditions and methods of learning to double the productivity of our school years given, of course, the kind of means the Great Society president promises, given, of course the kind of teachers we are and can become. And any forecast of the Great Society we are setting out to build, indicates that a mere doubling of the effectiveness of our schools will be wholly inadequate, will still be a Great Hypocrisy. Ever since that dog went up in a sputnik we’ve had a kind of “hound of heaven” making us responsible to prove “whatever Ivan can do Johnny can do better”. Well, perhaps he can. That certainly remains to be seen. Johnny just won’t orbit with Ivan unless a lot of the great hypocrisies are wiped out and soon. And the point is not so much to compete with Ivan, though I rejoice that we had that stimulus, the point is Johnny and his fulfillment.
To hear the spokesmen of the Great Society, we have been summoned to account by our nation to answer for Johnny’s inadequacies in sciences and technology and, yes, in politics and personal happiness. We have been summoned by our nation to a “break-through” in education, a break-through to reveal, in time to save us all, the hidden potential of Johnny’s human intelligence and human spirit. Keppel warns us, Hutchins harasses us, our conscience plagues us that we are educating young Johnny only for a world that is vanishing, has indeed already vanished. Paul Goodman, in his needling book, “Growing up Absurd”, tells us that we are hypocrites of the first order in our whole curriculum for Johnny, but especially in our day to day teaching of Johnny.
If we only half believe or half heed the warnings, we can take no comfort in teaching youngsters about the world of today in terms of making a living in it, in terms of making a happy social adjustment to it, indeed of becoming a good citizen in it. Those youngsters have to live in an unknown world of tomorrow, a world which we know to be as different five to ten years from today as worlds used to differ in five to ten generations and, just before that, in five to ten centuries. We are almost inured to hearing it said that half of our children will be employed in occupations which do not exist today; to hearing that 20 year olds will engage in six different careers in their ever changing work life; to reading that official unemployment of youth is double that of adults; to reacting to the tiresomely obvious automation which makes brawn and manpower increasingly obsolescent, an age that can throw 40,000 elevator operators out of work in New York City in a couple of years, an age that has Macy’s in New York experimenting with an electronic salesgirl. We know perfectly well she (or it) is almost perfected; yet we go on training salesgirls and obsolete merchandising and all those other wonderfully archaic marketing skills of a few minutes ago, as if that is not the essence of hypocrisy.
Three years ago the New York Times advertised for applications from persons in transistorized circuitry, inertial guidance, gyrodynamics, shielding design, ferret reconnaissance, human [?] science, micro-miniaturization, and data telemetry. Well, good Lord, our primary and secondary systems of education didn’t even have time to look up what that meant, much less build into the vocational elements of our schools, before the ads had switched to other skills not listed in any dictionary. Anyone training in the trade of printing today is nearer to Gutenberg than he will be to the realities of printing in another decade. His only possible gain will be that he… [last of line cut off]
Every teachers’ meeting in America today must be engaged in talking and debating vigorously about this, intricate, and perplexing, and obvious, human problem there is: how to educate for an undecipherable future. Are we truly in a transition now from a working society to some other kind of society? Dare we hope that it will be a learning society? Or must it be a society of miserable indolents, bogged down in wasted leisure and/or the despair of unemployment Hutchins, gad-fly that he is, may not be so far out when he argues for education for total leisure. The next cabinet post will surely be one that has to do with the problems of leisure and better recreation, so that leisure and recreation will have something to do with the intellect and the spirit and the tremendous fact of human mortality. Our founding fathers believed the twin curses of mankind were indolence and the love of money. The way to overcome the first was, they discovered to their dismay, to appeal to the second. But what is to happen in a workless, perhaps wantless, almost diseaseless, and if we are to survive it all, warless, society?
Well, I just don’t know, and neither do you. But all of us know that we are caught up in the vocation that is just about at the heart of the matter – the teaching profession. It is one calling that may last yet a while, despite its obsolescent ways, despite the fact that we see all sorts of teaching machines and machinery being built, thank goodness more or less teacher-proof, trying to short-circuit some of our obsolescent practices and prejudices. We all know in our conscience, do we not, that we are right to seek to abandon some of the trivial, some of the narrowly vocational parts of our curriculum, that we are right to be properly self-conscious about calling an education “social adjustment” when we can’t even get the society we are adjusting to in focus long enough to discover its values, political purposes, or prospects for survival.
So we might this morning join some others in speculating that the real aim of education – the great educational priority – is not yet, but is soon to be, to prepare people to make intelligent use of their free time, to avoid having leisure become misery. The stern commandment from automation, from the cy6bernetic systems we already live by, is to shape our education priorities around a preparation for living rather than a preparation for earning a living. This is what Hutchins and Barzun say over and over again, and they may be right. To be sure, there are some trained minds and meant taking no time our for leisure as they [last line cut off]
…else out of employment in the usual sense, in the traditional occupations, even including teaching. They are very busy indeed organizing machines and systems and life so that man, with unfamiliar free time, is now catapulting toward a choice between that old evil, indolence, and that new condition of grace, leisure.
Which is to say, we are surely on the edge of a breakthrough in educational philosophy, and it should occupy our attention and our throught and our long-range, if not immediate, goals in teaching and in preparing to teach better. The object of education, we may safely venture to say, along with a great host of others, is shifting to manhood and away from manpower, is shifting from the preparation for work to preparation for the human use of free time.
But total leisure is, fortunately, since we are so ill prepared for it, yet a ways off. And furthermore we are strangely unprepared to define what real manhood is, what the truly human uses of time are, what the full potential of the human animal in terms of intellect is. And we are never going to know these things until we tackle the science and art of teaching and learning as vigorously and with as much national commitment and national support as we give to space projects and armaments and wars.
Now, at last, we are on the verge of doing that, we have legislation and money and high purpose and LBJ. We may lack direction and agreement, we are far from a firm philosophy, but we have the mandate to join the battle. We teachers are gaining status, there are even signs of salaries that will give us needed dignity, but most of all there is legislation enacted and legislation brewing which promises to bring the best brains of our nation into this great profession, which promises to keep the best brains now in the profession renewed and honing up through research and re-study. If the medical profession can replace a kidney or renew a blood stream or expect to cure cancer as it did polio, it is because that profession has dignity and resources and highly trained and retraining professionals, because it has goals and dreams and daring. If the teaching profession can sort out its priorities and objectives, it can forge ahead, advance further in the next decade than it advanced in the last one hundred years. I am for the first time perfectly sure of that
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Twas the Night Before Christmas - December 1962
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, Rosemary'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS with apologies to lots of people
Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even Klaus.
Director Daly was snoring "ganz tief" in his bed
While visions of Term III danced in his head.
Beyer was dreaming statistics
And Bandis logistics
Marge Fry with a grin on her face
Fell out of bed and yelled, "GRACE"
Jim Umphrey home from a beer bender
Was tucked into his bunk by Julie Hender
The Giessa named Renate
Was bumming Hardy a moonlight sonata
Christmas is wundarbar" said Urmula. "Iwish it would last.
"BITTE" .... cried a voice from the past.
Martin and Ferjo and Lee were shaking presents under the Weinachten tree.
And who was awake and working at top speed
Nobody else but our little Annie Reed
All of a sudden there arose such a crash
That Leffland said to Helmut , "Someone' s robbing the cash."
Ed sowelewki grabbed his shot gun
And Hans Possin growled "Stop spoiling our fun"
Ian Hartman with hardly a look
Through out the window all of Plishke's books.
Away to the Fenster flew Herr Dokter Totten
Said he, "If I were in Denmark, I'd think something was rotten"
For to his flabbergasted eyes did appear
A ganz grosses sleigh and eight puffing reindeer
With an incredibly tall driver so spirtted and gay
He knew in einem augenblick it must be St. Ray
More rapid than MATS his coursers they came
And he shrieked and bellowed and called by name
Now Dulke and Dunning, now Rlmkel and Berssssssenbrugge
On heuschkel and Heidi, On Tillman and Townes
So up to the rooftop the reindeer flew
With a sleigh ful of .... cameras, mesesen china, rosenthal figurines, watches, camel saddles, 400 day clocks and prayer rugs ... and St. Ehrensberger, to.
'-2'
Then all of a sudden before Daly could turn round
Down the chimney came St. Ray with an outside bound
His eyes, how they twinkled, his dimples, how meery.
His cheeks were like dried prunes, his nose like a cherry.
He had a broad face and a round little belly.
That shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly.
"When do we eat?" cried St. Ray with decision
"NOW!" shrieked Miss Himmelmann in a voice of precision.
"We have "Beukama Soup" cried Betty Young, "That's for shore (sure)
"And flavored with POPPE seeds left in the desk of Wendy Passmore
Christel and Renate and Ursula, Megerles three
Did a daring dance dressed in leaves from the fig tree
Doris Resig sang a song, a sultry little bit
She lowered her eyes, and twisted, and was a big hit.
And Hohen Sonne Gerte appeared in a bikini
Looking most provocative and sipping a martini.
Then St. Ray raised his great grey head
And said it was time everyone went back to bed.
"I want my present," cried Mail Room Mike
"SO do I," said Marious, "I see something I like"
Old Dean Ray looked at his bag full of cheer
And wished at the moment he had a barrel of beer
He saw the pile of Geschenke under the tree
All bought in the PX -- tax free
He then closed his bag and locked it up tight.
And about his face glowed a satanic light.
MMy dear children, don't you know these are for or me. Because, "YOU NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD," said he.
And before Daly could reply, "This i s outrageous indeed!"
Up tho chimney St. Ray fleed.
He then sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle
And away they all flew like the down on a thistle
UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - USAFE Education Conference Speech - October 17 1963 - Wiesbaden
No full textEurope;Hoffmann, RosemaryMason G. Daly
Director
European Division
University of Maryland
October 17, 1963
USAFE Education Conference Speech Wiesbaden
I was afraid there was a diabolical conspiracy in putting a Maryland spokesman before the plenary session. I had to go to my colleague Phil Wheaton, to find out what plenary meant. Being a kind of political scientist he knew that congresses and conventions have long been holding plenaries of all sorts. I guess I had read too many releases on this conference and on Air Force education projects and I was sure plenary was a direct outgrowth of space age education about which Air Force in general and USAFE in particular and Mr. Beakes in every pore of his being are so vitally concerned. I was afraid that I might be standing here like an old burned out asteroid, at best an interference to smooth navigation, representing the academic profession in general my institution in particular, and my own person in every stopped-up pore of my being a kind of guerrilla warfare against progress. I am feeling more secure. I may have been cautious enough to keep my seat-belt well fastened throughout this conference, but I am facing you now with real confidence that I still speak the same language, am indeed more or less in the same age, and, with some solid fuels and boosters picked up at this conference, may get off the pad somewhat into orbit, and still manage to stay comfortingly in contact with old Ground-level academic circles.
Ages, you will recall, used to be measured in milleniums. One adjustment at least, and you were surely set for life. But look at our lifetime. A whole series of frightening ages. The age of the Big Bertha, the Big Blimps, the Air Age the age of the atom, the jet-age, the missile age, the space age, and coming up (what's left?), the Cosmic Age, I guess. Debt limitations are upped by every congress, never mind the party or the promises of the year before upped because there's a moon up there and someone is out to beat us and that's all tied up with survival, and survival is all tied up with education. Educate to survive. More scientists, please. More linguists please (we must not be a babel of tongues when we all get up there on the moon, now must we?). Mobilize the brains. Do something. Quickly. Isn't it a lovely age, an absolutely lovely age for educators?!
It is also a time, in the midst of all this racket and adjustment in the midst of all the turmoil and panic legislation to witness a calm, traditional educational gesture such as this conference. We can always do some sorting out; some mobilizing of forces; focussing of ideas; airing of uncertainties; taking of soundings; and we are sure to come away revitalized and reassured.
The very size of the Maryland delegation here today should be reassuring, at least to me. Just stand up, will you Marylanders, and show them. Now you see what I mean by mobilizing the forces. You all know we need periodic sorting out; you regularly help us get our ideas in focus; we are all, like you, in need of revitalizing. We are here because we know we need this contact,
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Welcome it, benefit from it - because we are an integral, inseparable, indispensable, and admittedly, frequently insufferable part of the UAFE education program.
The muster of Marylanders here at this USAFE space age education conference is altogether appropriate and reassuring, then, and our roll call today is as complete as it is because of a big assist from the jet age. We got the big Dean, Ray Ehrensberger, buckled down on the right side of the world at the right time, and we managed to time the visit of our big leader in Admissions and Registrations to coincide with this affair. Coincide enough to let you see the very human guy who goes with that name, G. Watson Algire, which appears on just about every official certification of anything really official that gets blessed by the rules and regulations of this complicated worldwide university. We wanted these big wheels here, along with as many of the European Marylanders as possible, not only to overwhelm or impress you with numbers, and provide me with a claque but to reassure you that we are intimately and irrevocably involved in whatever age of education is current for you.
President Kerr of the University of California, not forgetting the cosmos. I’m sure, has indicated that he believes we are moving into the Age of the Knowledge Industry. The Age of the Knowledge Industry. That doesn't roll off the tongue or conjure up bright, immediate images, but it should sound good to this gang. It may not ring out as well as that earlier age, the Age of Enlightenment, but we know that it had better produce far more in five years than that other bright age produced In 150 years, including poetry. University budgets now begin to look like big industry, and the day may yet come when more is silent in educating Americans than in burying them, thanks perhaps to that Mitford gal, but also thanks to the Soviet scare, the moon race, and Air Force education contracts - with Ohio State, if not with Maryland.
From Socrates to Beakes we have believed in the fundamental teachability of mankind. We have now demonstrated for all time and for all mankind that the Socratic method, essentially restricted to very young men in very quiet olive groves, is too limited for this time, and far too limited for the coming Age of the Knowledge Industry. The possibilities of and the screaming necessity for adult education are among the unfulfilled promises of our democracy, as surely as illiteracy in our time is one of the worst forms of immorality in our democracy.
Adult education may be becoming a way of life. There may even be a diminishing concern with diplomas and certificates and degrees and various union cards dreamed up to give status as well as stimulation. While we may be impatient with schooling as a status symbol we should be greatly encouraged that our society, even when making a fetish of the symbol, has roughly 30 million American adults going to evening classes. Not all of them are exactly toughening their academic sinews in some of the evening opportunities available to them, but all of them are forsaking some leisure and some television time. This phenomenal expansion must continue in adult, off-duty education -- whether offduty from the military or the factory or from raising babies or, yes, off-duty from teaching university classes.
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I represent here today an institution which surprised itself and the academic world and certainly the military community by wandering, quite innocently and tentatively, into the full proof that adult education, when it catches on, is sheer dynamite. Our experience may have been the despair of certain academic conservatives who watched the patterns of academia change and enlarge; however our experience has been the delight of those of us involved with Maryland, and with the couple of hundred other universities which got jostled into cooperating with the military education programs. We have found that the patterns of academia may change and enlarge, but that the fabric of higher education can remain indivisible Remain indivisible during fifteen years of overseas expansion, for instance; remain intact during a decade and a half of the stresses and strains of developing from 6 centers in one country, with an enrollment of 800, to a worldwide campus of more than 200 centers in 25 countries, centers located on improbable islands and peninsulas and deserts and ice-caps as well as in the heartland of western civilization, with more than 20,000 enrolled at one time. Our dimension is really too well-known to all of you to belabor here, but I suggest that even after 15 years there is something truly awesome in the fact that it ever happened, and that it continues an imperative, and sometimes impertinent, segment of the mother university and of the military community both of which are plagued with its presence but proud of its product.
The product, whether he is a student with only three hours of credit to transfer to another university, or a student with 12 hours and some personal proficiency and satisfaction in Spanish or German or French, or a student with a completed degree, with all of the rights and privileges and status pertaining thereto -the product is a source of pride, of historical record, of statistical fact. The informative booklet published by Marshall Boarman pretty well sketches in the historical and the statistical record of Maryland in Europe. His presentation may have played hob with any hope I may have had to point with pride to the same record during this speech; it is however the best possible means of showing all of this to all of you. You can now truly view his booklet and evaluate it and weigh it and see what it means without having this old Marylander run it all past you colored with his particular pride and predispositions.
I would like to touch in a different way on our history, on our historical commitment to the product and then allude to some of our plans and expectations which will affect the product now and in the future.
The Scripture by which we operate, the Gospel according to the Regents, the President, the Deans and the Department Heads, is very much concerned with the product. In my many years with University College I have found that the most mortal sin is to forget that the product must have the same courses from the same texts with the same contact time with the same standards demanded by a teacher with the same disciplinary background, all the same as that provided for the campus product. We may not receive absolution from Ray Ehrensberger or anyone on earth for forgetting that. We are not bound by preconceived notions of the proper day or time or place but if we want any laying on of hands from the mother university, we are bound by this one
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Inflexible, holy scripture. We have steered our course by this scripture with great success for fifteen years. Our students have credits sanctified in all temples of learning, and they have acquired those credits in a setting, often bleak in terms of the usual academic accoutrements, but usually rich in human and physical resources because they were earned in Europe, and they were added up at a time in his life when years could otherwise have gone by in a limbo of non-learning.
Our gospel calls for a posture of reasonable adventure and sensible pragmatism. We do not waste time speculating on how large we ought to be any more, or where we ought to be tomorrow. We can make our modest offerings available anywhere you assign our product and support his academic ambitions, because you can and do provide the advisory competence, the patience and labor to carry out registration and paper work, the interlibrary loan system to supplement the base library and our faculty library. We can do it because your Air Force population includes 50% officers and 85% enlisted personnel without college degrees, it includes a healthy supplement of civilians and dependents with similar deficiencies, and it includes a further supplement of individual adults always looking for and benefiting from intellectual stimulation in any organized form. All of these, perhaps together with a nearby Army population, combine to assure us that we have an obligation and a mission full of adventure. A cross section of our students show 67% enlisted personnel, 22% officer personnel, and 11% civilians. It is a rare class which would form anywhere without one of those percentages. Our pragmatic stance includes what one adult educator referred to as a “break even program committed to a Robin Hood method.” Let the “able to pay” do something for the “hard to finance,” he said. And I would add, it is a hairline balance to maintain at the best of times, a stance which topples when commands and commanders renege or reprogram or reallocate or just plain run out during the surge of education in the space age.
Our gospel charges our home departments with keeping us at the ready with vast numbers of approved part-time teachers as well as with a large faculty of orbiters, as we now call them. Believe me, our faculty know what the space age stands for. As a result we are, in the vernacular, growth—oriented, often in spite of ourselves and in spite of your budgets. When the need looms up anywhere on our vast campus, and the need may be for anything from 17 to 700 students in one place, we can answer the call and spread the good work, spread it without thinning the education process itself.
It is also written into our scriptures, in the first two gospels, that of the Regents and of the President, that Deans and Department Heads will be ever aware of us, ready to support us, and everlastingly alert to what we are doing. Regardless of their campus priorities and pet projects, they are directly charged with unremitting appraisal and evaluation of the overseas product. They are not allowed to get away with isolating and ignoring us, at least not for long. In this jet-age those Deans and Department Heads are suddenly and reassuringly and inevitably sort of just down the hall. The process of having everyone of them over here is just once again almost completed.
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Fourteen have been here in less than a year, and we have five more coming up. We spot a Dean or Department Head in four or five likely places, draw a big circle around that place on the map, and bring in all of his faculty in that circle, faculty who are active and/or stand-by. We put them in a room together, walk out and lock the door, and let them have at it. We also show them what you do, we show them students and classrooms and libraries, and finally, if they have an ounce of energy left, we show them a little of Europe. Two or three weeks of this and they may regret their obligation to us, but they will never forget that obligation and what it stands for.
Having given you the Scriptural basis of our operation as it relates to our history and our product, let me touch upon a number of vital issues which are our present joint concern, which will one day be part of our joint record of educational achievement in Europe.
A year ago in May, the President indicated at the Army Education conference in Berchtesgaden that the University of Maryland would consider Army and Air Force arguments that Graduate Study was needed and feasible in Europe. He offered to send his graduate deans to Europe for discussions, and Drs. Bamford and Prahl came six months later. Those Deans recommended favorable consideration, given the University's ability to supply a quality graduate pilot-project in one more of the fields requested. Meetings and councils and senates were held on campus; time dragged on: G&P thought it could do something; Education expressed an interest; Business Administration, with a new Dean and a new set of urgent priorities, was less favorable.
While Maryland Deans and Department Heads worried and seemed to waste time, there was an appearance of anything but wasting of time over here. One university after another was represented with various visits and explorations. To the credit of the other schools, there has been a tendency to be more specific about conditions and student numbers and cost per credit hour than has been the case with Maryland. Our delay partly stems from our own university structures which you all know can be painfully intricate in certain quarters; but it also stems from some other significant factors involving realism in costs and contracts and conditions, about which no university on earth is as well informed. We know, for example, that we will be held by graduate school regulation to 15 students per class in a 200 level G&P graduate course. And we know what that means in operating any graduate program, however pilot, on a paying basis. We wonder if either the Army or the Air Force can render any more support to a graduate professor, in terms of office space, housing, travel, library, etc. than is now available to our undergraduate professors, and we know the difference between those professors and their needs, as well as their salaries.
We are told, most directly, by Air Force, and with increasing directness by Army, that there will be no contract of a closed nature similar to those which Ohio State has managed with Strategic Air Command, contracts that really have the language and figures of the Space Age. In short, we predict that no guarantees will be easily arrived at here in Europe beyond those we now have
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for undergraduate work, which every veteran among you knows are wildly and disappointingly vulnerable to the fluctuations of military budgets, even individual military commanders.
Yet - after saying all of this, I am instructed and pleased to say that Maryland can and will open a graduate pilot operation in G&P and in Education in September 1964 and with a little time and initial success, some of us dare to predict even in Business Administration - GIVEN, given a reasonable agreement and some built-in guarantees that do not now exist to protect our undergraduate operation. What we can then do can be of the highest quality, exactly on a par with the home campus and Pentagon graduate programs (there's our Scripture again!). There can be no compromise. I assure you, on money, on entrance requirements, on sure logistical support. And there will be no compromise in turning out a standard MA product, from a D.C. centered school, which has an advantage that has already been vividly established by the same school in undergraduate work. Dean Ehrensberger is here now and before he leaves he will be glad to set forth some very clear conditions and guide lines to both Air Force and Army, and although you may justly say that it is about time, we may also justly say that the lead time (rather, lag time) has not been so painful or inexplicable in university circles.
A vital bit of news that we hasten to share with you is that we now know we cannot keep tuition any longer at 12 per semester hour. In September 1964 it will have to go up as it already has for the Pentagon and in the Atlantic and Campus Divisions. We intend to keep the increase as modest as possible. The probable figure will be 13.50, but we hope for the sake of potential graduate students and undergraduate students studying in most places in the U.S. that there will be an unrelenting effort on the part of the services to get the $13.50 ceiling raised to be more in line with the academic facts of life. Given the kind of encouraging enrollments this Division has experienced during the past three years, except when one command or another ran out of funds, this modest increase in tuition will permit us to stay in competition for a proper faculty and staff - a both terrifying and comforting competition by the way - and still be able to carry small classes and small bases and pay attention to the individual student cornered somewhere with a dangling degree requirement for whom only a seminar-sized class is the answer.
I should refer to our Munich Campus freshman and sophomore operation tor dependents of the military and government employees. It is a healthy operation of 450 students this fall, an operation somewhat harrassed, as you know, with uncertainties about who was funding for whom from what pot with what legal right. Both Air Force and Army rightly reasserted their support of the 13 year old school just as the freshmen reported in to the dorms this fall by dipping into the non-appropriated fund pot.
It is now decided that support in the future will become more reimbursable but no less vigorous. Next fall students will be assessed an
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additional fee by the Army for use of dormitory and dining space and a few other support items for which they are not now charged.
Even with this added military fee and a slight increase in Maryland tuition, these students will find an academic bargain by any standards of comparison in a European cultural center that is difficult to match.
We compliment both the Army and the Air Force for the joint determination to continue this element of their broad commitment to education, a commitment that extends to all ages, and must certainly extend to those dependents who are on the threshold of college.
In the field of mathematics, in this age of Space, there is a new look that won’t stop. There is a new vocabulary, there are new systems, experiments in new texts and teaching methods, not to mention new computers and gadgets of astronomical complexity. Maryland is becoming a leader in this complex computer business on campus, having one of the half dozen most astounding computer centers in the world. Like most universities right now, Maryland is trying to bring Mathematics more in line with Space Age requirements. New courses are on trial on campus, new textbooks and systems of instruction are under development, and we are bracing ourselves for launching the system overseas.
It should be remembered by all of us that the student coming out of the high schools in 1964 is quite a different mathematical animal from the one who came out of the high schools in 1934 or 44 or 54, or even 1960. The new look in high school math is getting the new graduate readier for the new look in college math. Over here we will have a real sweat getting the older guy up to date enough to tackle the beginning college math classes which are heading our way. We are asking for campus guidance and help right now, and we will be turning to you, especially to Air Force where our present math courses are most in demand, to sort
Thinking outside the search box how UMUC implemented customized and taught discovery services to meet student needs
No full textPresentation on how UMUC librarians implemented, customized, and taught students how to use EBSCO Discovery ServiceThinking Outside the Search Box:
How UMUC Implemented, Customized, and Taught
Discovery Services to Meet Student Needs
Li Fu, Digital Services Librarian
Rocco DeBonis, Reference & Instruction Librarian
Cynthia Thomes, Reference & Instruction Librarian
MLA/DLA 2013
Ocean City
May 10, 2013
Overview
• University of Maryland University College (UMUC)
• Electronic Resources & Services
• User Satisfaction Survey
• EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS)
• EDS Enhancement: Subject Searching
– Development
– Testing
– Launch
– Promotion
– Assessment
• Future Development
About UMUC
• University System of Maryland
• Worldwide student body: 97,000
• Non-traditional students
• 76% of total enrollments online
• Virtual library with small staff
Electronic Resources & Services
• Subscriptions to 125 databases
• ~190,000 eJournals & eBooks
• SFX link resolver
• CONTENTdm digital repository
• Web site
• LibGuides
User Satisfaction Survey
• I'd like to be able to search all
of the databases at one time,
sort of like with Google
User Satisfaction Survey (cont.)
• I never learned how to search
across all databases for a particular
topic.
It seems like you have to choose the
database first.
Who cares about the database?
I just want research to be easy like
with Google.
User Satisfaction Survey (cont.)
• A simple search box on the
main page, like Google, that
would automatically search all
databases would prevent
switching back and forth from
one database to another.
User Satisfaction Survey (cont.)
• The search engine through
the database should be made
easier to use.
I'd much rather prefer to not
even access ILS and just use
Google or Google Scholar…
Silos of Information
EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS)
• Implemented August 1, 2011
• “One-stop research portal”
EDS (cont.)
0
200000
400000
600000
800000
1000000
1200000
1400000
EZProxy logins
pre-OneSearch
(Aug 2010 - Mar 2011)
post-OneSearch
(Aug 2011 - Mar 2012)
Pre- and Post-EDS Implementation
EDS (cont.)
• Impact
– Individual database usage dropped
– Positive feedback from patrons
• Caveats
– Overwhelming search results
– Irrelevant hits
• Future enhancement possibility
– Subject searching capability
EDS Enhancement: Subject Searching
Development
• Project initiated in June 2012
– To enable subject search capability
– To improve user research experience
• Team
– Digital Services Librarian
– Reference Librarians
– Input from Library staff
• Timeline
– Summer 2012 (June – August)
EDS Subject Searching
Development (cont.)
• Project workflow
– Liaise with EBSCO
– Create mockup page
– Research and familiarize with EDS subject
searching technology
– Finalize subject areas with Reference
Librarians
– Technology implementation
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow
• Liaised with EBSCO
– Established communication channel
– Obtained technical specifications of EDS
EBSCOhost Integrated Search (EHIS)
profiles
Sample code to connect to EDS searching
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
• Mockup page
– Drop-down menu for multiple subject areas
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
• Mockup page
– Closer look at the drop-down menu
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
• Researched and familiarized with EDS
subject searching technology
– Set up EHIS subject searching profiles in
EDS admin
– Develop prototype
– Further customizations (e.g., search results
page)
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
Finalized 19 subject areas
• Art • Health Care Administration
• Anthropology • History
• Biotechnology • Homeland Security
• Business & Management • Information Technology
• Criminal Justice/Intelligence Mgmt. • Political Science
• Distance Education & E-learning • Psychology
• Education • Science
• English & Literature • Sociology
• Environmental Management • Writing
• Gerontology & Aging Services
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
• Problems with subject areas
– 80% of subscription databases were
searchable in EDS
– Removal and replacement of non-searchable
databases
– Naming consistency of databases
EDS Subject Searching: Development
Project Workflow (cont.)
• Technology implementation
– Set up EHIS profiles in EBSCO admin
– Developed prototype
– Preliminary testing
– Troubleshooting
Development - Project Workflow
Technology Implementation
• Set up EHIS profiles in EBSCO admin
Development - Project Workflow
Technology Implementation (cont.)
• Individual EHIS profiles – adding
resources
Development - Project Workflow
Technology Implementation (cont.)
• Individual EHIS profiles - branding
Development - Project Workflow
Technology Implementation (cont.)
• Developed prototype (HTML, JavaScript,
programming)
Development - Project Workflow
Technology Implementation (cont.)
• Tested 19 subject areas
– Functionality
– Content
– Customizations
• Identified issues
– Authentication error message
– Missing resources
– Inconsistency across profiles
• Troubleshooting
– Profile setup
– Contacted EBSCO about missing content
– Customizations in admin
EDS Subject Searching: Testing
• Invited library staff for testing in blog
EDS Subject Searching: Testing (cont.)
• Systems and reference teams tested
the subject search prototype
• Impressions of new search tool posted
in the library’s internal blog
EDS Subject Searching: Testing (cont.)
• Live demo for staff
• Fine-tuning
– Customized the name of each subject area
– Added the Back to OneSearch button
– Removed advanced search link
– Removed search examples in widgets
– Cosmetic changes to EDS widget
• Final testing
• Enhancement requests to EBSCO
– Search all resources automatically
– Add advanced search as a limiter
EDS Subject Searching: Launch
• Launched on August 29, 2012
− Embedded in library home page
EDS Subject Searching: Launch (cont.)
• Closer look at the EDS widget
EDS Subject Searching: Launch (cont.)
• Biotechnology search results page
EDS Subject Searching: Launch (cont.)
• Embedded in LibGuides
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (Internal)
• Trained library staff on how to embed
widgets in learning environments
– templates
– documentation
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (Internal) (cont.)
• Created templates of widgets in LibGuides to
embed in learning environments
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (Internal) (cont.)
• Documentation on how to embed widgets in
LibGuides and online learning environments
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (Internal) (cont.)
• Embedded widget in online learning
environments.
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External):
Reference
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Reference
• Student question: “I am trying to find
articles on CODIS (Combined DNA
Index System), but irrelevant data
keeps returning.”
• Solution: Select the Criminal
Justice/Intelligence Management
subject search option
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Reference (cont.)
• Student question: “I need an article or
some readings that will describe the
biology of stem cells… and how they
have the ability to treat diseases and
injuries.”
• Solution: Select the Science subject
search option
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External):
Instruction
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Instruction
Question #3:
Enter your search statement in UMUC
Library OneSearch, running your search
across All Subjects. How many results
did you get?
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Instruction (cont.)
Question #4:
Use the drop-down menu under the
OneSearch search box to select a subject
area relevant to your research topic and
re-run the same search that you ran for
#3. Which subject area did you choose?
How many results did you get?
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Instruction (cont.)
Question #5:
Compare and contrast the results from
your searches for #3 and #4.
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Instruction (cont.)
Student response to #5:
Narrowing down the subject for #4
reduced my search results significantly
making it easier to find the best matches
for my research.
EDS Subject Searching
Promotion (External): Instruction (cont.)
Student response to #5:
The vast number of results that I received
with the first search are hit or miss whether they
are relevant to my actual search statement or
not. All of the results that I receive in the
second search are included in the first, but to
find them I must sift through many irrelevant
results first…
EDS Subject Searching
Subject-Specific Search vs.
“All Subjects” Search
• Patron research level
• Scope of assignment/research
• Subject matter
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
• Focus group study
• EBSCO admin stats
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
Focus Group Study
• Participants
– 5 graduate students
– 2 undergraduate students
– 3 LIBS 150 instructors
– 1 UCSP 611 instructor
– Academic Writing Director
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
Focus Group Study (cont.)
• Question
“Do you simply enter a search in the
default search box, or would you use the
new feature of limiting searches by
subject? Why?”
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
Focus Group Study (cont.)
• Responses
– 10 respondents preferred the default
search box.
Several worried about missing something
– Two select subject searching to save time
and get more relevant hits.
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
EBSCO Admin Stats
• Percentage of total EDS visits (count)
that used subject search bar:
– September 2012: 15%
– October 2012: 12%
– November 2012: 12%
– December 2012: 11%
– January 2013: 15%
– February 2013: 14%
– March 2013: 12%
EDS Subject Searching: Assessment
EBSCO Admin Stats (cont.)
• Most used EDS subject search:
– Business & Management
Characteristics of high usage subject searches
• Least used EDS subject search:
– Distance Education & E-learning
Characteristics of low usage subject searches
Future Development
• Participation of more content providers
• Relevancy ranking
• Search all resources at once
• Added social feature (e.g. tag, review,
“Did you mean?”)
• Open access
• Promotion
Thank You!
Li Fu
Rocco DeBonis
Cynthia Thomes
[email protected]
http://polaris.umuc.edu/library/MLA-DLA2013.pd
Perceptual factors affecting female access to CEO placement in the hospitality industry
No full textThe purpose of this research is to:
Identify major factors (visible and invisible barriers) affecting female CEO placement in the hospitality industry.
Provide a conceptual framework for industry leaders to address and assist women in overcoming these major factors.
The scope of this research is women leaders in organizations, primarily the hospitality industry.Perceptual Factors Affecting Female Access to CEO Placement in the Hospitality Industry
Theresa Poussaint
Candidate for the Degree of Doctor of Management University of Maryland University College
March 1, 2013
Purpose and Scope of the Research
RQ1: What are the major factors affecting women’s access to the position of CEO in the hospitality industry? RQ2: How can industry leaders create a gender-neutral corporate culture that would assist women in overcoming these major factors?
Female CEO
Female Leader (gained credibility and legitimacy by achieving results)
Leader with GEI
Social-Awareness
Access- Agent
Change-Agent
Self-Assessment
•It is possible to create a gender-neutral corporate culture that provides women access to leadership opportunities.
•Perceptual factors, including assumptions, discriminatory processes and stereotypes, of women as leaders can be barriers for women to advance to the CEO position. Awareness of these factors may help organizational leaders promote a corporate culture that include women in decision-making and executive management opportunities.
•Self-awareness of visible and invisible barriers pertaining to the career advancement of women should continue to be a part of its strategic plan, organizational conversations, and succession planning.
Primary Practitioner Scenario
Components of Gender-Equality Intelligence (GEI) Model
Conclusions
The purpose of this research is to:
•Identify major factors (visible and invisible barriers) affecting female CEO placement in the hospitality industry.
•Provide a conceptual framework for industry leaders to address and assist women in overcoming these major factors. The scope of this research is women leaders in organizations, primarily the hospitality industry.
As presented in the Xerox and IBM case studies, even though both companies implemented policies and practices that included succession planning to improve the representation of women and minorities in upper management, it took approximately 30 years of employment before Ursula Burns (Xerox) and Virginia Rometty (IBM) were appointed CEO’s of these companies. Women primarily leave organizations because of limited advancement opportunities. Giving women equal access to leadership opportunities will not only level the playing field, but will improve the timeframe in which women are appointed to a CEO position.
Theory 1: Leadership Theory
(Bass, 1999; Burns, 1978; Northouse, 2012)
Claim: An organization’s self-awareness of women’s inequitable access to leadership roles can improve women’s chances for advancement to the CEO position.
Literature Theme 1: Gender & Leadership Styles Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, & van Engen (2003); Eagly & Johnson (1990)
Literature Theme 2: Women Leaders in Organizations. Eagly, Karau, Miner, & Johnson (1994); Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky (1992)
Literature Theme 3: Perceptions of Women Leaders. Day, Shleicher, Unckless, & Hiller (2002); Koenig, Eagly, Mitchell, & Ristikari (2011)
Theory 4: Emotional Intelligence (EI) Theory (Goleman, 1995)
Theory 3: Role Congruity Theory (Eagly & Karau, 2002)
Theory 2: Gender & Leadership Style Theory (Denmark, 1977; Werhane, 2007)
Proposition 1: The potential for prejudice is present when individuals hold a stereotype about women that is incongruent with the attributes they believe are required for success in leadership roles.
Proposition 2: Discriminatory practices are viewed as a disadvantage for female leadership, and when these practices are ingrained in the organizational culture this prevents women from having access to advancement opportunities.
Data: Leadership itself is gendered and can be viewed as a barrier for women. Men are considered for leadership roles more often than women. Female stereotypes and assumptions can limit women access to leadership positions.
Warrant: Women are as equally skilled and educated as their male counterparts, yet female managers are not entering the highest leadership positions nor compensated at the same rate as their male peers.
Research Question