Mary Kadera
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A reformer and his recruits

9/8/2024

 

I’d been a high school teacher for four years when I determined it was time to earn my masters degree. I was deciding between UVA and NYU in the spring of 1996 when I answered a long-distance phone call (remember those??) from a professor named Alan Howard. “I’m calling to recruit you,” he told me.

Two years earlier, Alan had started a masters program in American Studies within the UVA English Department. The program required one intensive year and aimed to equip graduates with marketable skills as much as intellectual ballast. It also emphasized production of information and resources for public good: rather than writing theses that might be read by half a dozen people and then archived in the university library, we would be learning how to build websites to publish our work and we’d serve as interns with local museums, historical societies, and arts organizations. Alan’s motto was “We DO American Studies.”

I was flattered to be recruited and I accepted his invitation, joining four other grad students for what would be quite literally a life-changing experience.

Our summer reading list included George Landow’s Hypertext, which explored how the internet—and more specifically, clickable hypertext links—would change the way humans construct and consume information. Four decades later, it’s almost impossible for us to remember a time when we couldn’t follow links, but at the time it felt (and was) groundbreaking. In Alan’s American Studies program, I hand-coded websites instead of turning in papers for my courses. This included the courses Alan himself designed and taught, which explored the American West, Washington, DC, and the 1930s.

My year in the American Studies program taught me new ways to think, new ways to understand America and its place in the world, and new ways to produce and share information and ideas. When I returned to high school teaching, it changed the way I taught and how I thought about assessment. Later, it enabled me to land a job at PBS in its fledgling Interactive Learning division, where we used the internet for then-revolutionary purposes like virtual interactive field trips, online professional learning, and on-demand video streaming.

I kept in touch with Alan after I left UVA. He helped me teach HTML to my ninth graders so that they could publish an online magazine of their writing. He followed my work at PBS with great interest and shared his own work, which after retirement from UVA included establishing a scholarship for nurse practitioners in southwest Virginia and using technology to connect and support nurses in Appalachia.

He came to my wedding and I went to his retirement celebration. When I was considering moving to Arlington, he put me in touch with his son, whose children attended Arlington Public Schools. He talked with my husband, who at the time worked in real estate and construction, about housing developments that were springing up around his beautiful cattle farm just outside Charlottesville.

Two weeks ago I learned from his daughter-in-law that Alan had passed away. He died at home on his farm, and he was 85 years old.


I’ve been blessed in my life to have had some really wonderful teachers, and Alan was one of the best.

He understood that there are all kinds of things humans can know, and only a fraction of them are things that we value in our schools. Several times during that year, Alan invited me and my classmates to visit his farm, where I got the sense that his accomplishments as a farmer meant just as much, if not more, to him than his degrees from Princeton and Stanford. In his obituary, his family wrote: “He felt equally at home with William Faulkner and John Deere.”

He understood that there are all kinds of ways for humans to demonstrate and share what they know, way beyond the papers and standardized tests that we prize in education. Alan explained to my classmates and me that the UVA English Department had examined whether high scores on the Verbal section of the GRE predicted the long-term academic and professional success of its graduate program alumni: according to Alan, they discovered that the only thing correlated with high GRE scores was a greater likelihood of mental breakdown. (This led us, over the course of the year, to warn each other that we were having a “High Verbal” kind of day.)

He demanded a lot from himself as a teacher and believed that we should demand more of our systems of education. After single-handedly launching and running the American Studies program for five years, he asked the English Department to evaluate it and make recommendations for its improvement. He contributed a Self Study Narrative to that evaluation, in which he wrote:

I came to believe in 1994 that the English Department had reached a critical juncture in its graduate program: it had passed from an institution unwittingly accumulating the world's largest stock of unemployed Ph.D.s and ABDs and had become a knowing producer of unemployable graduate students in English. Unable to accept what one of my colleagues termed the "recreational Ph.D.," I determined to create a terminal M.A. in English that would re-tool bright and capable students for productive work outside the academy.

​…[the] Humanities had—by their resistance to public accountability and their inability to articulate the social value of their enterprise, by their inability to imagine the undergraduate and graduate curricula as anything more than the means to produce even more unemployable academics, and by their inability to engage in meaningful examination and reform of their own institutions, programs and curricula—essentially defaulted on its traditional obligations and filed for bankruptcy.


None of this let students off the hook, however: he expected us to own our own learning. Early in the program, I met with him in his office and he asked me what I thought I wanted to study. I had no clue, and I blathered extemporaneously about a dozen or so topics that seemed like they could be fun to investigate. He gave me what can only be described as a world-class side eye, took a long drag on his cigarette, blew smoke in the direction of the window, and said drily, “Then I can’t help you.” The meeting was over.

We need more Alan Howards in education: people with high expectations of themselves and their students, who reject complacency and catalyze change. He wrote, “Like a shark, the Program must keep moving just to stay alive. Course content can, to some degree, be rolled forward; but in very fundamental ways, it has to be new and different each year. Both the students' work and my own is in plain sight. Neither of us can simply repeat what someone else did last year because it’s already been done! And this takes a good deal of energy on everyone's part.”

Alan’s sense of responsibility to his students—his conviction that he needed to push himself, to get it right for us—is accountability in its finest form. It’s not at all the same thing as the accountability peddled by many policy makers and measured in things like Virginia’s new school accountability standards—more about that in my next post.

I’m sure that after nearly four decades as a professor, Alan’s legacy includes a stack of scholarly books and articles. I don’t know much about that, because I never read them and he never talked about them. I think he believed his students were his real legacy: “As I explain to them, they are their own best work, and they are uniquely qualified to tell you whether or not it proved a job worth doing.”



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    Mary Kadera is a school board member in Arlington, VA. Opinions expressed here are entirely her own and do not represent the position of any other individual or organization.

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