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- Dr. Jim Dickinson
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Jim Dickinson
LB: Were you involved in the development of the program for higher education persons who worked in student affairs?
JD: I helped. I’ve done a full circle in my life and Ellen and I had a couple of courses that were languishing as adult education courses. One day I said to her, “Do you know where those courses and group dynamic kinds of things would be ideal?” I said, “That’s exactly what student affairs people need to know how to do. We ought to start a student affairs program,” and by golly we had no idea where it fit in the College, but we tried to get the program anchored in the Department of Educational Leadership. Educational Leadership was not eager to have the program so when Ellen cast out her net, up showed Wilma Henry from the area of student affairs. She was an assistant dean of student affairs and before you knew it we had a program up and running with Ellen and Wilma. It is still running and it’s still in the Psychological and Social Foundations Department even though the Dean and others kept thinking that it belongs in the Higher Education Department. It turned out that Higher Education really wasn’t eager to have the program since they had their own kettle of fish to deal with. So, yes I think it was a matter of my suggesting to Ellen we do it and all I had to do was a nudge to Ellen. She’d snowball down the mountain and sweep everything in her way.
LB: What sentiment would you want to give to students entering education today or entering our College of Education based on dealing with so many students over the years who were striving to become teachers, or school psychologists, or administrators involved in education?
JD: I don’t know that it qualifies as a sentiment, Lou. Let me just say I have a very strong bias that subject content matters and I don’t think attitude alone makes a great teacher. I think people have to know something. They have to know something about the subject that goes beyond the text. You have to know something about it in a relatively conceptual way in order to really unveil it for their students. I think that teaching is a structured enterprise with much of the structure coming before we ever walk into the class. That’s work. Let me just give you a story which illustrates this. I had an undergraduate psychological foundations class and I gave an early exam, which was kind of rare for me. When I put the distribution of the grades on the board, 50% of the students failed to get a C. No one or maybe one person got an A, and the rest, a few got Bs, the rest were Cs, Ds, and Fs. A student raised her hand and she said to me, “Dr. Dickinson there’s a question I have about the results.” She said, “How is it possible that so many of us didn’t get a passing grade when we’re all A and B students?” I said, “You’ve been misled. Somebody has misled you. You’re not A and B students. You didn’t perform that way.” I proceeded to teach them a whole section on memory over the next four or five weeks which is what I was going to do anyway.
I had them break into teams and each designed a study guide for each of the assignments. One team would do a study guide on one chapter, one team would do another and then we would look at the results. Everybody had the study guides and then we looked and compared the scores of the people who prepared the guides versus the people who used the guides. In every instance, the guide preparers did better. And that was my way of helping them see that there is no shortcut. It takes time to unpack that information. It involves more than outlining or underlining what you read. Most of these people did not know how to study. They didn’t know how to do that. From my point of view when we allow people to get through a program as undergraduates with a B.A. degree they should have a conception of what it means to study. I wonder how in the world they can possibly help their students learn how to penetrate their disciplines, if they can’t. I still tutor in an elementary school, I find that problem today when I sit in classes and I’ll tell you when I work with students on a one to one basis which makes it a lot easier. They get a lot of directed feedback about their reading skills and it helps them. I think work, concerted effort, and disciplined effort with the content is a key to successful practice. I don’t think I’m different from my folks in school psychology in that regard. I don’t think I’m very different from you in that regard. LB: No. Are there any questions I haven’t asked you that you hoped I would or should have asked you? JD: Gee, no I think you’ve given me the opportunity to shoot off or go off on these matters. No, I really don’t have anything to say other than, and I will add this finally, I have no regrets having come to University of South Florida. I had a number of opportunities to go elsewhere to Big Ten schools, back to Iowa, and I didn’t want to do that. I really felt that this place allowed me to grow in ways that I wanted to grow and didn’t prevent it. I really had a lot of freedom and I found that for me personally it was a rewarding experience.
LB: That’s a comment, sentiment that I’m hearing from many of our friends and colleagues in the College of Education and I strongly felt that way coming here staying here.
JD: There was not a thing about this place that would prevent you from reaching your goals. Nothing would prevent you from getting any grant money if that’s what you wanted to do. Nothing would prevent you from becoming a specialist in an area that you haven’t specialized in before. I just think it has been partly because we had so many students, we had so much money and enough faculty members that we could actually build our own little enclaves.
LB: My previous experience at my alma mater it was difficult to start anything new, I had to break down walls while here the walls weren’t built yet. That’s quite, quite different.
JD: Most probably we had a lot of things we did that we wished we hadn’t, but some of them took off and they really paid off.
LB: Well, thank you for coming in today and sharing your experiences and thank you for all you have done for the College and the University.
JD: You’re very welcome.
LB: I appreciate your time. Thank you.
End of Interview