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Session Submission Summary

The world in Teachers College, Teachers College in the world

Thu, April 18, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Street (Level 0), Regency A

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Teachers College at Columbia University in New York has had an enormous influence in the history of our fields. Names such as John Dewey, Edward Thorndike, Margaret Mead, Harold Rugg, or Maxine Greene, among many others, are integral to understanding education today. The knowledge produced by Teachers College’s faculty, and perhaps as importantly, the scholars, policy-makers, and educators they formed, have had the power to shape how we think about, act in, and regulate schools.
This influence is clearly not limited to the US. This research project seeks to explore and better understand the network of international knowledge production that had Teachers College at its center in the first half of the 20th century. Through a combination of archival work focusing on doctoral dissertations written by international doctoral students at Teachers College 1899-1940, biographical investigation, and an epistemological network analysis, we aim at answering the following questions:
What kinds of knowledge and ideas were centered and marginalized among faculty and international doctoral students at Teachers College between 1899-1940?
What kinds of political and epistemological transnational networks were shaped by these individuals and their institutional affiliations?
How were those ideas and knowledge adopted, resisted, changed and appropriated with the passage of time?
There are several goals undergirding this project. First, to understand the transnational flow of ideas and educational models at a time of heightened nationalisms, as a way to counter both the notion of globalization as a new, almost ahistorical process, and simplistic country-to-country explanations of how ideas travel. Second, to identify the institutional forces that supported, resisted, and adapted ideas coming from an American institution in an era of tremendous growth in the influence the US had over much of the world. Third, to contribute to a history of the present, in which the global circulation of ideas, policy and reform models is taken for granted.

Framing the study

Not much has been written about the history of Teachers College. The only full length, at the time assumed as comprehensive book specifically about this topic, A History of Teachers College, Columbia University (Cremin, 1954) was published over 60 years ago, and while valuable, is clearly situated within a Cold War framing of history, guided by a vision of Teachers College, and the US, as beacons of light, freedom, and democracy for the rest of the world to follow. Teachers College makes an appearance in many articles and books about the history of American education (Fraser, 2007; Good & Teller, 1974; Urban & Wagoner, 2013) usually in reference to progressive education (Fraser, 2007), a radical tradition as embodied by Counts and Rugg (Zeichner & Liston, 1990), and its role in establishing the foundations of educational psychology in the US (Pulliam, 1987).
Yet none of these works would be able to illuminate the role of Irma Salas, a doctoral graduate from Teachers College in 1931, in the foundation of the early childhood education system in Chile. For that, one would need a multi-scalar analysis linking her biographical trajectory to the knowledge she acquired and developed while in the US –leading her to become the first Chilean woman to obtain a doctoral degree in education-, to the philanthropy that funded her stay, to the specific pedagogical and political arena she came back to in 1930, and to the networks she inserted herself into upon her return. None of these components would be sufficient by themselves, requiring instead a nuanced historical and network analysis.

Research process

The project will be divided into four phases. The first phase, which is taking place at the moment, entails collecting data on international doctoral students between 1899 (the year Teachers College granted its first doctoral degree) and 1940. An initial review of commencement programs has yielded 140 names. A database is being created with the students’ information (including undergraduate institution, dissertation sponsor, graduation year), the dissertation’s theoretical framework, and its main findings and/or contributions.
The second phase of the project will make use of the tools provided by network analysis to create an epistemological network linking ideas, people, places, and institutions (with special attention placed on universities and philanthropies). This epistemological network analysis will focus on the production and circulation of knowledge rather than biographical information.
The third phase will map the influence of the most significant nodes established on the previous phase. This phase will pay special attention to how the languages of education (Tröhler, 2009, 2011) of the time shaped and were shaped by these interventions, as a way of connecting phenomena across time and space.
The final phase will involve writing a book that brings these findings together in a report about Teachers College’s role in shaping education reforms across the globe, and the ways in which a better understanding of this process contributes to historicizing the present moment, in which the global flow of reform movements (Ball, 2012; Friedrich, 2014; Friedrich, Walter, & Colmenares, 2015; Stromquist & Monkman, 2014) seems to be part of the common sense about how change takes place.
The presentation at CIES 2019 will focus on one slice of the project, centering our attention on the knowledge that intersected in the life of Prof. Isaac L. Kandel, by looking at his own dissertation (1910) and later works, a few of his doctoral students, and his links to the ideas promoted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

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