Episode 39: Book Project

INTRO:

As we look forward to an amazing new school year, I’m going to talk about something that came to my attention on social media but also resonated with me as a former first grade teacher. Today, I’m going to share some insights I believe all elementary teachers should consider before assigning a common back-to-school writing assignment. 

CONTENT:

0:01:16 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Today we're here talking with Dr. Fran Spielhagen, professor emeritus of Mount St. Mary's College in New York State. And we're talking today about a book that we have written together, which is what's been taking up most of my time the last few months. Fran, would you like to talk about and tell us the title and the publication of the book and how it came to be?

0:01:37 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): I'm delighted to tell you about it. The title of the book is Catalysts for Change. Baby boomers reflect on their legacy to public education. The publication date will be fall of 2023, in time for the 60th anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination, and I'll get into more about that later. The title of the book actually really explains the whole reason why the book came about and what I intended when I approached the contributors to share their insights.

0:02:11 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): But first, a little bit about myself. I retired from education two years ago after over 50 years in education in general, 30 of them were in the K Twelve environment, and 20 were in teaching teachers in the years following that. I really spent some time looking at public education today and how it evolved over my lifetime as a baby boomer. I think it's important to understand the baby boomer mindset.

0:02:41 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): We Boomers were born in the post World War II optimism, and we were born with a can do attitude. For many of us, myself included, education was the key. Many of us were first generation college goers, and so education became incredibly important. But certainly for myself as a woman, the place I would go with education, at least in those early days, was to be right back into education and teaching. Along about the time that we entered college, we encountered President John F. Kennedy, who asked us not to ask what our country could do for us, but what we could do for our country.

0:03:25 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And so that attitude of returning the favor really characterized the Boomer mentality, I believe. And of course, then, tragically, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

0:03:39 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): And so do you think, Fran, that the baby boomers of your generation really took upon themselves to go get something after they went into college and graduated? Were they all thinking, I need to go and do and make something of myself and give back to the community because of John F. Kennedy's speech?

0:03:58 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, I think that would be a generalization because I'm sure there are many baby boomers who thought, how much can I get for me? But I think a large majority of us really believed in giving back, especially those of us who came through the working class, those of us for whom education was the key. I recall my dad saying to me so many times, you are different. You are different from me. You will have an education.

0:04:27 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): You will do wonderful things. I work with my back. You will work with your mind.

0:04:33 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): That's powerful stuff.

0:04:35 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Very powerful stuff. Is a very intelligent, gracious man who worked with his back his entire life. And died way too soon.

0:04:44 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): My doctorate is from Fordham University. I have great allegiance to that university because its mission was certainly when I started there, to the first generation college.

0:04:57 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Goers and for them to also give.

0:04:59 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Oh, absolutely, yes, yes. Fordham University is a Jesuit university and the motto is Scholarship into Service.

0:05:07 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): So that fits really well with not only your mentality growing up, but also with this.

0:05:13 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Absolutely, absolutely fit. Completely. And interestingly. Also. I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and Fordham was in the Bronx. And if you know anything about city, you know that's a far away place. But I was taken there on a field trip by a teacher and became absolutely enamored of the campus. And I decided I would go away to college by traveling on the subway to college because my father was like, you're not going away anywhere.

0:05:41 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): You're a good little Italian girl. You're going to stay home and study. But I did go to Fordham University and graduated from there and ultimately got my two graduate degrees there.

0:05:54 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Can you talk a little bit about the process of how you selected people to be part of the book with you?

0:06:01 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, I selected them basically on the work that I knew that they did and I knew that they had given back. So I knew that these were all baby boomers who had made significant contributions to various aspects of public education. I basically asked people, tell me about what you thought when you were doing what you were doing. And so we have chapters on special education, we have chapters on policy changes, and my own chapter on policy changes in terms of inequity, in mathematics and science.

0:06:38 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): One of my contributors, I knew him as a youngish man when we both started our doc studies together, and he has really traveled up the ranks and he's now a president of a private college. Another gentleman that I knew, he was very significantly involved in teacher education program evaluations, and I thought that was incredibly important in terms of the baby boomer legacy. How do we make sure teachers are being educated?

0:07:05 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Well, so these people that you selected to contribute a chapter to the book were people that you knew were also baby boomers of the same era and were all involved in education and they all had this common goal of taking up the cause of President Kennedy. Is that right?

0:07:24 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, I don't know whether they consciously verbalized that goal, but my contention is that was latent in our experience. If you think about it, we came of age. The earliest ones of us came of age at a time of great hopefulness possibility in the American culture. And John F. Kennedy, wealthy as he was, crystallized that sense of we need to give back. And so as we came of age and began to make our journey into higher education as students, he was assassinated.

0:08:02 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And before we could even get started to fly to his mandate to ask not as we were beginning our journeys, his ended. And that was a pretty dramatic climatic event in our trajectory. Now, whether we consciously thought about it or not, I couldn't say. I can only now in retrospect say that had to be in the backdrop and more than simply background being a motivational force.

0:08:33 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): So being 2020 as the saying goes, is really something that was helpful in coming up with the idea and the concept of this book.

0:08:42 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Oh absolutely. I conceptualized the book as I was retiring from education as a full time educator and so I was being very retrospective about my own life and so the business about John F. Kennedy. I mean I can remember sitting in a classroom and having my college professor say to me, your president has been assassinated. And so I think about that and I think about how that colored how I saw mean. I remember going home on the subway and people crying on the subways because he was such a symbol of our hopefulness.

0:09:24 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And so now five decades later, reflecting on that, I realized that what a motivational force it was for us to move forward. But that was not the only thing. It was the baby boomer mentality that we needed to move forward because we were the generation, we were the post war generation that was going to make change and the optimism that infused our generation before the downbeat of the beat generation and the hippies and so forth. There's that crystallized attitude know, we're going to do something, we're going to do something.

0:10:01 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Never mind of course, that many of us were hippies and walked around the Bronx barefoot myself not included in that, but I knew many people who did.

0:10:13 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Do you think that the current generation of teachers and educators and people in education, both K Twelve and in higher education are also thinking about the same things about taking up a cause, about giving back? Do you think that president Kennedy's speech has transcended even these many decades later?

0:10:33 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): That's a really interesting question. What also came about in those 50 years were the standards movement to make sure, presumably, that everyone was equitably being met with suitable education. I mean, let's get honest about it. That's really what the standards movement was about. And so the move towards equity morphed into this standards based education. And I think knowing what I know about teacher candidates whom I taught for 20 years, there definitely for the vast majority of them, was a sense of mission, a sense of commitment, a sense of giving back.

0:11:19 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And then I think that comes face to face with the punitive aspect of the standards movement for both the students and the teachers. So I think it's extremely difficult at this point in time to live out that dream, given all of the constraints there are on education in general right now. So I think part of what I was hoping to happen with this book was that the hopefulness would come through, the legacy would come through, so that in some way it could go towards increasing the dialogue of transforming.

0:11:53 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Public education back into what it was intended to do to be the beacon for youngsters as they came through the system and a path for them to succeed as we did.

0:12:06 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Okay, so how did you and I get involved together in this book?

0:12:13 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): That an interesting question Paige.

0:12:15 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, Paige, you and I met about ten years ago when I was on sabbatical at the College of William Mary Center for Gifted Education. And I had been connected with them for many, many years. And so there I was in residence, and there was this very eager doc candidate, you, who used to stop into my office. I can remember this teeny little office I had. And you would stop in, and we would chat about, oh, God knows, all sorts of things. And I was very impressed by your eagerness and by your general work ethic.

0:12:51 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): A lot of the doc candidates came through, and they barely were there, but you were a presence, and that's how we got to know each other. And quite honestly, I couldn't think of anyone who was not a boomer who could put the lens onto it that I wanted. What I wanted was someone who perhaps was the child of a boomer. And you and I have already determined I could be your mother.

0:13:18 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Look at what we had to say and on the one hand, perhaps put a scalpel to it or at least put a flash of light onto it, but on the other hand, reflect on what did that mean going forward with your generation of educators? You're the people who are running the show now, and so therefore, it was important to me to have that lens. So that did this concept have legs? What was meaningful in the book, and what did you have to say about it.

0:13:48 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): In many ways this is a capstone work for me, although the publisher has said he doesn't want to hear that from me.

0:13:54 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): It was a privilege to work with the contributors and to work with you. I think we have a worthwhile thing here, I think as the baby boomers retire and have been retiring, what they did and what they said is important for education moving forward.

0:14:10 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): So that's your hope for the book is that it's an important piece of the educational puzzle moving Forward absolutely. I think it will really contribute a piece because oftentimes younger people in education right now may not be thinking about those necessarily that came before them. But I think this book has a lot of different perspectives of what really, truly happened before the current day and what really, truly happened in education and how things that we do now that we may take a bit for granted came about or had just begun or were so many years ago just being created.

0:14:49 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): And that was something that was really eye opening for me as the final contributor, as the more present day voice, is that some of these things that I had been learning about and doing and hadn't really understood the history behind. I was able to really step into that person's shoes and say, oh, this is why this happened, or this is why this was created.

0:15:12 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, I agree completely and I'm absolutely thrilled to hear you say that because that was my intention.

0:15:19 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Was there something about the book or any part of the topics that were covered in the book that surprised you in the end?

0:15:27 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): That's an interesting question. Not so much surprised me, but it gave me pause that some of the contributors worked very, very hard at distancing themselves and talking about the topic in a third person, objective way. And others of the contributors saw it as completely personal with personal pronouns. For a work of this nature isn't necessarily what the audience needs to hear. The audience needs to know the lessons, more or less.

0:16:01 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And that's not in any way criticism of the contributors. I basically asked them what are your reflections? And so they gave me their reflections. But one of the things that I was thrilled about was that anytime I asked a contributor to tweak or edit, they were right there, right away improving what they had to say because they believed in what they had to say.

0:16:27 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): And that was very edifying for me. But again, I didn't choose slackers. I chose good professionals who knew what they wanted to say and said it as best they could.

0:16:38 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): If the publisher were to come back to you and say this book was really successful, which of course, we hope it is going to be successful as being part of the educational framework moving forward, and said to you, we'd like to do a second part. A second contribution to this book. Is there something that comes to mind that you would contribute as a part two?

0:17:01 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): I'm not exactly sure what that might be, but what I would love to happen is for the contributors to be able to enter into dialogue with contemporary educators through the lens of what the contributors did and how that's playing out in their experience. Where are we now? Did this work?

0:17:24 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Your chapter was lessons Learned from the Veterans. So how about the veterans learn from the practitioners about those very same issues?

0:17:33 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): That would be wickedly cool to do.

0:17:36 - (D): Something like that all of a sudden.

0:17:38 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Boom. I thought that was my capstone, but I guess not. But you know what the burden may be on you to find the contemporary educator.

0:17:47 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): The burden may be on me. We'll see. We'll see about the part two, now, won't we? Was there anything else that you want to add?

0:17:54 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): I hope that the legacy does stand if we look at all of the contributions that these chapters record. These are good contributions. I believe strongly in what we have here, and I'm really hopeful that it'll resonate with the readers.

0:18:10 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate all of your answers to the questions. And also, it's been a real pleasure working on this book with you over the last few or many months.

0:18:23 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): Well, the pleasure has been mutual. You're an excellent colleague. And so we'll have to talk about book two now.

0:18:32 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): Yes, we will. Thank you again.

0:18:34 - (Dr. Fran Spielhagen): All right, take care.

0:18:36 - (Dr. Paige Hendricks): That concludes my interview with Dr. Francis Spielhagen on our collaborative book entitled Catalysts for Change baby Boomers Reflect on Their Legacy to Public Education, out for publication in fall of 2023. Please take a look at it wherever books are sold, and there will also be a link to it on my website@paigehendrix.com.

OUTRO:

Thank you so much for joining me. To review key takeaways from today's episode, including getting access to all things printable, please visit my website@paigehendricks.com.

You can subscribe to Get Off the Dotted Line right now in the app you are using to listen to this podcast and receive new episodes as soon as they are released. I can't wait to share another podcast with you. Thank you again for joining me, Dr. Paige Hendricks in today's episode of Get off the Dotted Line. See you next time.