• Home

• College of Education Faculty Oral Histories

• Dr. Jane Young

College of Education Faculty Oral Histories

Dr. Jane Young

LB: And movement education approach of teaching fit right in?

JY: It facilitated that.

LB: Appropriate challenges for each child, individualized instruction.

JY: That’s exactly right.

LB: For each student?

JY: Yes.

LB: So basically, you and Pat Tanner really spread the word about movement education through the national association at conferences, even after you arrived here.

JY: Right.

LB: That continued on.

JY: That’s true. However, we also were well supported by a lot of people who have been trained in America, worked in America, and were fairly well known. Had it been just the two of us, we wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Because we had people behind us like Betty Logsone, Kate Barrett, Naomi Olinbowl, people like that, we were able to do things I think that otherwise we would have been more stifled, and we might have had some influence locally, but that would have been it.

LB: Marge Hensen.

JY: Marge Hensen that’s right, yes. She was the one I think who invited us to do that demonstration. She knew Pat and she invited Pat to do that. Pat suggested that the two of us go so that worked out very well.

LB: I need to go back to your teaching in what was then the Professional Physical Education Department. What stands out in terms of your students or work with students in the schools?

JY: Well, one of the things that were part of the philosophy of the program was that the program was truly was truly a program, not simply a series of courses that students took either random or out of order. The program was built on this developmental level. Now a lot of these students came in with very, very different backgrounds from what we hoped they would leave with the knowledge and understandings of what we hoped they would leave with. And that was a real challenge because we only really had two years to do this in.

And part of the reason that I think it was successful, and there are many reasons, was the knowledge, ability, and quality of the faculty of the program because all the faculty were involved with all the students at some time or other. They went through a program that was very similar to some of the block programs that are now being used in universities. We as a faculty spent a lot of time helping them to know each other very well, helping them to be supportive of each other, and also helping them to work together as a group. At the time when I started physical education you were teaching very much alone. You were marginalized a lot of the time because you were out there, you know, either out in the field or in the gym. And getting to talk to other people in the so called academic community of teachers was sometimes almost non-existent depending on how busy your schedule was. One of the things that we felt was important was to build this little camaraderie amongst the students. That was done in various ways by a lot of group seminars, by a lot a cooperative teaching, a lot of cooperative learning, too.

In terms of what they did actually in the program on campus then was to help them to do that out in the schools and they could. I think they could really see the connection between what they were learning on campus and what they were going to do in the schools. And the other thing that happened was they had several internships. I think they actually had four internships when I first came in. They were in an elementary school and then they were in a sort of junior high school. Then at the time when I first started here they had two internships at the high school as I recall. This is where my memory gets a bit fuzzy, but I remember that they were in schools and interning a great deal. It wasn’t like a many teacher education programs at that time where the program is totally devout to what they were doing in school. It was almost like a medical education where they were practicing as they learned and practicing appropriately as they learned. I think that was one of the things that struck me very much when I first came. When they first come in the first two weeks, you know they expect to learn all of the quote “sports.” Then they were faced with some of these very different approaches to physical education it really threw them for a loop for awhile until they got out in the schools and were to begin to put it all together. By the end, those that remained in the program through to the end, and we did have some dropouts, you know, rightly so because either they didn’t like it or it wasn’t what they thought it would be, or it was harder than they thought it was going to be, and those that made it to the end I think have made and are making a lot of contributions to the field. We have many of our students who are in high positions in the field, or those that have retired by now, were able to make a difference in the field at that time.