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- Dr. Jane Applegate
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jane Applegate
LB: Today is February 2, 2006. I am Lou Bowers, and I’m interviewing Dr. Jane Applegate, former Dean of the USF College of Education. She is currently a Professor of English Education in the Department of Secondary Education. Jane, thanks for coming over this morning and sharing your thoughts about your time here at USF.
JA: I’m glad to do it.
LB: Before we get to USF, I’d like to hear a bit about your background and work experiences in education and so forth at other places before you arrived on campus.
JA: I have felt so fortunate over the course of my lifetime to have selected a career in education, because I can’t imagine myself doing anything else. And yet, when I was an undergraduate, I probably tried five or six different fields before I actually chose teaching. My parents were both teachers, and I grew up with that teacher talk all around me, so I was determined to try something else. But teaching suited me, and it still does.
I did my doctoral work at Ohio State University. Even as a doctoral student, I was learning about some of the scholarships that were being created here at USF and through the work of B. O. Smith in particular, who was really one of the founders of the field of teacher education, which was my doctoral major and is my love today. When I finished my Ph.D., I went to work for the Ohio Department of Education. They we were creating standards for teacher education for the very first time. It’s hard for me to believe that I’m that old, but that was in the late 1970s, when people started thinking about teacher education as having a body of knowledge. Standards were needed to shape licenses for teachers and to be certain that teachers who graduated from colleges had obtained a body of knowledge and skills that were valued. I felt really well prepared, but I was surprised by the policy arena that was occurring in Ohio at that time.
After I did that work, I actually went back to Ohio State to manage a grant that was written to include fifteen counties in the center of Ohio for the purpose of developing teacher professional development activities. It was a federal project. Through that experience, I became acquainted with grants and contract work and what it meant to work with a large group of people and administer a program. I look back on those two experiences in particular as giving me a good background for the work that I was going to do later in university administration.
From that position I moved to Kent State University and became a faculty member there. Half of my job was working in the Dean’s Office managing field experiences, the placement of students in the public schools. Those were just wonderful experiences allowing me to work in public schools and yet in the University at the same time. I’ve always believed in the importance of school-university partnerships and that aspect of teacher education became a focus of my scholarly writing. I always found that intersection of school and university to be both interesting and problematic. How is it that we all care about the same things, we all care about the quality of education, and the quality of personnel, both at the university and in the public schools, and yet we have such a hard time coming together around these particular issues?
So, at Kent State, again I got involved in grant work. I actually got the first federal grant that that university had ever been awarded to create an individualized teacher education program for bright kids who had not considered teaching because teaching seemed like a lot of rules and regulations to them, and bright kids always liked to break the rules. I wrote this grant to enable us to take bright kids and fashion an independent kind of study program for them that would eventually lead to teacher certification. And amazingly the grant was awarded and we carried it out, and even today there are remnants of that program embedded in Kent State’s teacher education program because of the kinds of courses and experiences that we were able to create for those students.
There I was a teacher, an administrator, a grant writer, and then I was asked to become an associate dean and take some responsibility for the teacher education program at the university. I look back on those times that I was in my 30s and I was just full of all kinds of good ideas. It was a time when there was less regulatory pressure and teacher education was fun. It was fun to experiment. It was fun to talk about ideas and to try things differently. I don’t think today we have those luxuries, but at that point in time it was a great place to be and a great time for me. I never really thought of myself as going ahead to be a dean, but I was encouraged. And so in 1991, I started applying for dean jobs, and went to West Virginia University in Morgantown and was Dean of Education there for six years. During my deanship there I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to work with a private foundation in Pittsburgh called Benedum Foundation. They had singled out improving education in West Virginia as a major theme for their giving. And my very first day on the job at West Virginia I’ll never forget, because I walked into the office, and in fifteen minutes the president of the university was in my office saying, “Come on, Jane, we’re going to Pittsburgh.” He and I rode to Pittsburgh, and we came back with a check for $2 million.
LB: Wow, a good first day.