A Conversation with Deborah Seltzer-Kelly
From its inception, the goal of a Wabash liberal arts education has been about giving men a broad depth of knowledge, teaching them how to be able to communicate it effectively, and think on their feet—solving micro and macro issues within their circles, however broadly or narrowly defined. While Wabash has—like many other small liberal arts colleges—been pushed out of teacher licensure by escalating accreditation requirements, the department of education studies is becoming better poised to build leaders in all aspects of education.
In common nationally with many other places, Wabash was beginning to see a larger and larger number of students who really wanted to teach, but who were going to do it through a post-baccalaureate licensure program, or through an internship or apprenticeship-type program. In some ways, we’re blasting back to the origins, which is the idea that a teacher needs a good, well-rounded liberal arts education.
Education is an entire field. It’s not just about training teachers, it’s about looking at the terrain, historically, of how education has developed in our country and what is going on now on the policy level and philosophically. And how should it accomplish those goals?
While many students who complete the minor do go on to careers in teaching or within school systems, others are interested education law or policy, educational psychology, museum education, public health education, or teaching and mentoring within corporations. We have had education studies minors interested in sales, business management, non-profit management, youth services, social work, ministry, and higher education. We’re also seeing students come through who are just members of their communities that are very interested in schools. Many of them would like to run for school board someday, for example, because they see things that need to change.
Our two foundations courses (EDU 101 and EDU 201) introduce students to educational development and educational philosophy. We offer a variety of elective courses such as multicultural education, adolescent literacy, educational policy, curricula for history and civic literacy, urban education, and rural education. We’ve been thrilled to be able to cross-list several of our courses with the Black Studies minor—and we value that connection deeply since it meets the needs of our students and meshes so well with the work the College is doing in equity and inclusion—particularly through the new $4.5 million Lilly Endowment Inc. grant centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
We have some students who take our intro level classes to satisfy their diversity credits. Dr. Michele Pittard’s EDU 101 Educational Development class is behavioral science. There’s a laboratory aspect, in which they read about childhood development—social, emotional, and cognitive. Then they go out in schools and observe, help out in classrooms, and hang out with kids. They come back and say, “Wow, the book was right.”
The other big moment for them is when they spend a day following a middle schooler. They’re looking for the ways that students are engaging in the classroom, but also how they’re engaging within their social group. They have conversations with them about their perspectives and experiences and things they like and don’t like. It’s a big eye-opener for them. It comes up in oral comps all the time. That one is very clear in their memories.
Another popular class has become the educational policy class. It includes statistics for non-science and math majors—sort of citizen literacy. All the time we’re reading in newspapers and seeing news reports with lots of statistics, sometimes used deceptively. How do we wrangle with those?
So, I combined educational policy with statistical literacy in the framework of big questions in education. How did we get to so much testing? Where did this come from? What’s the history of educational testing in the United States? How do policies vary state to state? How much or how little is the federal government involved in? How do we interpret this data on student competency testing and report cards? How do we look at the percentage, for example, of free and reduced lunch in a school? What does that tell us about the kinds of challenges that teachers in that school may face and about the ways our education system views human learning?
We’ve been doing a slow refocus since 2012—a self-study looking at ways in which we can expand our programming to meet students’ needs and interests. We’re seeing increasing levels of student interest in policy areas, and in human learning and social emotional development—which interact with majors including PPE and psychology. Educational philosophy and history are also big content areas. There are so many possibilities, and in true Wabash tradition, we are constantly asking ourselves and each other how we can continue to get better.
Deborah Seltzer-Kelly is an associate professor of educational studies at Wabash and is currently the department chair. She has been at the College since 2012.