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- Dr. Jim Dickinson
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jim Dickinson
JD: It seems to me that there were two sorts of challenges that were macro. One had to do with how we were going to develop or how we would develop our professional credentials. What is it that we did that we brought to the game for the preparation of teachers and or educators that made us distinctive and useful? That was a kind of ongoing issue. The Psychology Program has an easier part of it than the Social Foundations Program. And so in that side of the department I think we were a little clearer. At least we were persuading one another that it made more sense to talk about human learning as it related to classroom practice and instruction and child development as it related to a variety of curricular offerings for kids of different ages. So for us it was a little clearer. Then very quickly, Walt Musgrove began what emerged as our School Psychology Program.
The Social Foundations people really had a very tough time deciding how they were going to present themselves except as it was part of the curricular requirement for undergraduates. They did not have a great plan for developing an overarching graduate degree program or anything like that. They really were, from my perspective, focused on service to the undergraduate programs and maintaining their foothold in the programs in the undergraduate teacher education programs. So that was a kind of a macro issue and it had to do with professional identity and the growth of an appearance of special competence valued by the College of Education. The other side of it was our relationship with the Department of Psychology and that was a one that was really uncomfortable. I was not used to being in a college of education that did not have strong support from the psychology department.
The University of Minnesota was really exceptional in that regard. Their psychology department was first rate. Their support of their university’s educational psychology program and their college of education was amazing. I mean, we had access to their entire faculty. We had no problem getting into their courses. They had no reluctance in serving on our committees and the like. When I went to Iowa, it was a little bit colder in terms of the climate between the two, but there was a strong sense of common interests and I had very good working relationships with the chair in the psychology department at Iowa and the people in the clinical program. So it was really comfortable you sort of knew you could count on them and when programs came up for review, you’d run them by them and there was not a lot of nitpicking.
I came here and what we found is that right off the bat when we wanted a school psychology program that the Psychology Department was really clamping down and we had some “knock down and drag out” battles with the Psychology Department and their representatives. They weren’t interested in doing school psychology, they just didn’t want us to do it and use the name psychology.
It was over a couple of years when Glen Geiger and I would trudge over to the Psychology Department and kind of plead the case. Ultimately, we prevailed. But it came only after some very, very tough discussions. Then, when Jim Jenkins came as the chair of Psychology Department from the University of Minnesota I believed that the climate changed dramatically. By then I had developed good relationships with a number of the people in the clinical wing and some of the people in the learning side of it, Doug Nelson being one. We really found in Jim Jenkins a person open to considering psychologists and their programs in another college as a legitimate, and indeed necessary, part of psychology which was a major change in the Psychology Department’s orientation.
It certainly made our lives a lot easier in the School Psychology Program. It was much easier because then their faculty could serve on our doctoral programs and had no problem co-chairing or working with us. If you’d ask me could I have predicted that, I would have said no, we’re going to suffer through this for as long as I live. One other strange coincidence, Wallace Russell came to us from Minnesota. He would become the dean of the USF College of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the last several years I was on the faculty. Wallace Russell had been my minor advisor at the University of Minnesota so I had both my major advisor and my minor advisor on the faculty here by the time I had put in the years. Wallace Russell was a psychologist who had exactly the same outlook about education, about psychology, and applied psychology as Jim Jenkins. What a difference that made. So the leadership at that level facilitated at least the educational psychology part of it. The Social Foundations Program part stayed principally focusing on undergraduate offerings and then they developed graduate courses suitable for doctoral students and saw to it that those were part of the requirements for the core curriculum.
LB: The USF School Psychology Program at the time it was developed was that unique? Were there many programs?
JD: There were other programs of school psychology. The discipline as such was really just developing. It was not what you’d call highly visible. I think at Minnesota we had people who taught school psychology when I was there. And at Iowa, the school psychology program was starting to branch off from special education. So their, school psychology program was kind of growing to some level of autonomy. By the time people started it up here, there was at least a national organization of school psychologists which provided some standards to be met and some things to be aspired to I guess.
LB: Now that program went on to gain a lot of funding. Did it not?
JD: Oh, yes.
LB: And state support.
JD: That, from my point of view, has been one of the exemplary graduate programs in the College of Education. Glen Geiger set the stage and the most important thing he did for the School Psychology Program apart from really giving it the direction was moving it forward after taking it over after Walt Musgrove. Geiger insisted on paid internships in the school districts. Nobody thought we’d get it, but you know within a year of Glenn setting his mind to it, we had paid internships for all of our graduate students. Those graduate students went out and were supervised, and they were paid. They would bring psychological services and the various components of it to schools.
Then, Howard Knoff came on board and he had a national stature, and ultimately became president of the National Association of School Psychologists. Because of Howie, we recruited George Batsche and Michael Curtis. I say this because the program has evolved so nicely that we started really selective admissions. If you compare us say with Counselor Education, I don’t know what their admission rate for applications to admissions is. But in School Psychology, we very quickly were at the point where we would have say fifty applicants with eight students admitted. Today, I think we have probably over 100 or 125 applications and the same level of admissions, which is really exclusive. They decided long ago that they were interested in program quality that would be sufficient to attract financial support, attract other good students, and attract good faculty. The School Psychology Program every year had one or two kids who received the University fellowships. In that sense, it has been a very successful program despite some of the problems it has had recently.