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- Dr. Jane Applegate
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jane Applegate
We also under my watch had the opportunity to develop the Charter School. I know when the Charter School was being envisioned and Pizzo Elementary School was being built here on this campus, along with the Early Childhood Center already in place, we saw many possibilities for partnerships among these schools and our faculty. We wondered many times should a college of education have that close an affiliation with public schools? Should we be having public schools and private schools on our campus? But I looked at those as a community outreach initiatives on one hand and an opportunity to do some good research on the other. The closer we can affiliate with the real lives of kids and teachers, the more access we have to studying them, to creating innovations that might foster early learning for kids who haven’t had early opportunities in life. So that was an interesting undertaking.
LB: Back a little bit. Was the Belize project a contract with the government to improve their technology in education?
JA: Right. That was another Caribbean initiative which reached out to Belize and going there, working with government officials, developing an exchange memorandum of agreement between Belize, the government, and the University of South Florida to look at ways that they might improve their technology, both in their higher education system down there as well in their lower public schools. As a result, we have several Belizean students in our graduate doctoral programs. Again, that was another international outreach activity.
LB: Now, we had professional development schools when you arrived. I know you supported those.
JA: Yes, we had partnerships in both Hillsborough and Pasco Counties.
LB: King High School…
JA: King High School and Weightman Middle School. And I don’t know what’s going on in those projects today. I’ve often thought about the distinctions between USF and our work here with professional development schools and what we were able to do in West Virginia. I think there were really two major differences. One was in West Virginia where we had funding to support those initiatives. We didn’t have that kind of funding here. And the other is the size of each state. In West Virginia, we had 250 undergraduate students who were involved in teacher education. Here we graduate about 1,000 a year. So if we were going to carry out professional development school work in Tampa with USF, we would need hundreds of schools to partner with us to do that kind of work in a very intensive way. We simply did not have the resources or the personnel to carry it out here in totality.
LB: I remember through the years when you were Dean, the Florida Department of Education was fairly active, mostly because of the legislature telling them what curriculum needed to be implemented for teacher certification. Those were challenges you had. You had to be the spokesperson for the College, diplomatically telling them what we were going to do. JA: Those were big struggles.
LB: Everything from the 120 hour rule to additional required courses for programs?
JA: I had never quite experienced the intrusiveness of a state government into the business of a college in quite the way that it happened here. I’m glad you reminded me of that. I was having a conversation before I came to meet you today with Dean Kennedy about the forces and factors at work today in allowing virtually anyone to open up courses, modules, experiences for the preparation of teachers. My whole life history has been involved in teacher preparation as a collegiate experience, and now we’re finding private businesses and not for profit organizations creating courses for teachers. Community colleges are now offering teacher preparation programs. So there is a whole host of what are being called “service providers” offering modules and courses to prepare teachers because in this day and time you can take a test and become a teacher. Today you don’t have to have classes and you don’t have to have practical experiences in schools. I just shake my head at it because I think in the end it’s the kids who suffer when they are presented with a teacher who doesn’t have appropriate background and preparation. If a teacher doesn’t know what to do when they come into a classroom, then the kids sit there, or they create chaos and the whole education experience is lost. But is some ways I’m an old curmudgeon in that regard, and as I said to Dean Kennedy, I have had to learn to adjust my values and to think about our work a little differently.
LB: A news report last night that many people who left teaching after only a few years were teachers with no preparation.
JA: Right, that’s right.
LB: You’ve had this other career, and now you can be a teacher with little or no preparation.
JA: I think we in Florida, like Texas, like California we’re short on qualified teachers. The statistics of late say we’re going to need 30,000 new teachers next year in Florida. Well, the University of South Florida is one of the largest teacher education colleges in the nation and we’re producing maybe 1,000 new teachers a year. So where are those people going to come from to staff our public school classrooms? I don’t know. It’s a challenge today, but I continue to love my career in education. I’m teaching a course this semester called, Teaching the Adolescent Learner, to this new population of MAT people.
In the class, I have people who have been nurses, have been lawyers, are working in law enforcement, have been in advertising, and have been accountants. All of these people coming from other careers recognize that they need to be educated about schools before they go into them. They’re a wonderful population to teach, but I tell them they’re the smart ones because they recognize that there is a body of knowledge that’s going to be useful to them when they work with kids. They’re not just going straight into the classroom. They are becoming educated about teaching.