Camilla P. Benbow

Whether in economics, politics or global affairs, we have all been struggling to make sense of a world that no longer feels very stable.

In such a climate, education offers our best refuge and remedy in a world where so much feels uncertain. The more we know about how the world really is, the greater our tolerance for complexity—and for each other. It bothers me that when we scapegoat teachers, schools and even higher education for our national ills, we deny our children the very resources needed to secure them against an unpredictable future.

As this issue of the Peabody Reflector seeks to make clear, Peabody faculty send our education alumni out into the world well prepared to navigate a profession beset by society’s demands of teachers. Young professionals like Brooke Fox Allen, BS’09, MEd’10, deserve our admiration and support.

Of course, Peabody-trained teachers are not the only ones characterized by altruism. Graduate students like Jill Robinson and recent graduate Nicole Garcia, whose essay is included here, represent the kind of research-based engagement with issues that partly defines our Department of Human and Organizational Development. In this instance, their efforts are directly helping to reduce the negative impacts of sex trafficking on women and society.

Students, faculty and programs alike have all been transformed by the success of Vanderbilt’s recently concluded Shape the Future campaign. To ensure that this momentum is maintained, the Opportunity Vanderbilt initiative will continue to seek resources to enable every deserving student to attend without regard to financial ability.

We are grateful for your support for both of these efforts, as we are for all you do to promote Peabody’s success.

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

At a systems level, the growing incorporation of technology in education is one of the most powerful forces driving change in the field. More than ever, technology is being used for assessment, monitoring and decision making—as well as to promote learning.

Tennessee, for example, is among a cadre of states collecting and disseminating data to do such things as create early warning systems to identify students at risk of dropping out, evaluate teacher performance, predict student performance on high-stakes tests, and improve instruction. Of course, using data to inform decision making is nothing new for Peabody students both in education and non-education majors alike.

For its part, the Peabody faculty has used technology to develop such innovations as the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED) to measure principal effectiveness and the
Peabody Treatment Progress Battery to give feedback to mental health professionals. As for classroom instruction, those familiar with the college’s recent history may well recall that Peabody faculty members developed such learning technologies as Read 180 and The Adventures of Jasper Woodbury.

This issue of the Reflector explores efforts to understand, develop and apply educational technology by current and new members of the Peabody faculty, while looking at how our own IRIS Center uses technology successfully to disseminate materials on teaching students with special needs.

If all this talk about technology sounds a little off-putting, remember, we are still a college of education and human development—emphasis on the word human. With that in mind, we will introduce you to several HOD alumni giving back to their communities in very humane ways.

Camilla P. Benbow
Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

The college traces its lineage through a series of institutions to the founding of Davidson Academy, which was granted a charter in 1785 by the territory of North Carolina. The school opened its doors the following year. Nashville itself was less than a decade old; attacks by local Native Americans were not uncommon in the early days of the academy.

Yet the settlers survived. Davidson Academy became Cumberland College; Cumberland College became the University of Nashville; the University of Nashville became the State Normal College of Tennessee, then Peabody Normal College, and George Peabody College for Teachers. In 1979, we merged with Vanderbilt.

Today, Peabody and Vanderbilt are global institutions and becoming ever more so. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering—and celebrating—our origins. This issue of the Peabody Reflector does just that, even as we look forward to future accomplishments.

This fall, Peabody added new faculty members, including several who promise to deepen our impact on teacher education. Our joint endeavor with Metropolitan Public Schools of Nashville has enrolled its first class of 16 master’s degree students. They will study tuition-free while teaching math, science and literacy in Metro middle schools. Our entering class of doctoral students numbers 45, up 12 from last year and bringing with it a remarkable number of prior publications. We have enrolled nearly 250 new master’s and Ed.D. students in our summer and fall cohorts. They come to us from 38 states and from outstanding undergraduate institutions, including a number of historically black and Hispanic-serving colleges and universities. This year’s class of first-year undergraduates includes an unprecedented number of students who are recipients of full-tuition scholarships.

In short, all signs suggest that Peabody’s long journey from frontier academy to one of the world’s most innovative and vital schools of education and human development continues at full speed. We are grateful to the readers of the Reflector for coming along.

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

By the fourth grade, African American and Latino students run three academic years behind their white peers.

Only 55 percent of Latino and 51 percent of African American students graduate from high school, compared to 79 percent of Asian students and 76 percent of white students.

Of students who enter college, the gap in completion rates between minority students and their white peers is about 20 percentage points, with only about 40 percent of minority students graduating within six years.

Following schooling, the achievement gap becomes an economic gap that reinforces a negative cycle. Adults with only a high school degree are estimated to earn $1 million less over the course of their lifetimes than those with a college degree. In the current recession, the unemployment rate for high school graduates is more than twice that of college graduates.

These dismal statistics reflect a picture that has changed little since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was first passed in 1965 with the hope that it would equalize educational opportunities for low-income students. With the ESEA up for reauthorization, it comes as little surprise that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been framing education as “the civil rights issue of our generation.”

So it is perhaps appropriate that in this issue of The Reflector, we take a long look at the many dimensions of the achievement gap, and the many ways that Peabody College faculty are working to address this vexing educational and social problem.

Also in this issue, Associate Dean James Hogge reflects on two very different decades of service in the dean’s office. As Jim prepares for a “partial” retirement beginning this summer, I would be remiss in not taking this opportunity to offer my heartfelt thanks for his 43 years of service to Peabody College. We are extremely grateful.

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

This fall we added nine new members to our faculty in positions across all five departments. Two of these outstanding scholars, Laurie Cutting (special education) and William Turner (human and organizational development) hold named endowed chairs. Bruce McCandliss, another endowed chair holder who joined us in January, is profiled in this issue. Our ability to recruit faculty of national repute is just one of the outcomes of Vanderbilt’s Shape the Future campaign.

Another campaign result is support for student financial aid. Vanderbilt’s commitment to replace need-based loans with grants is one of the factors that led to a record number of applications for undergraduate admission last year. The result was the most selective class of entering students in the university’s history. Proactive recruitment strategies and Peabody’s high reputation as a graduate school have resulted in similar increases in the number and quality of students in our master’s and doctoral programs.

Our goal as a college is to ensure that Peabody students—from undergraduates to doctoral candidates—have the best possible learning experience while here. Our agenda for 2009-10 focuses on issues of quality, on the creation of rich learning environments for our students, on enhancing the characteristics that make Peabody distinctive, and on translating excellence into contributions to the world around us.

Evidence of those contributions can be seen in the work of Professors Dale Farran, David Dickinson, Ann Kaiser, Carin Neitzel, Debbie Rowe and Georgene Troseth, whose research on early language development is described here. All of them are having positive effects on the well-being and learning of children during early childhood, which has long been an area of emphasis at Peabody.

A strong sense of community is another defining characteristic of the college. Social media have certainly created many more spaces for Peabody students, faculty, alumni, parents and friends to communicate or simply to keep up with everything happening here on campus or around the world. Readers of the Reflector may wish to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. YouTube makes the intellectual life of Peabody and Vanderbilt available long after graduation, while LinkedIn is presenting new possibilities for career development.

As always, I am grateful for the interest and support for our work shown by all those who care deeply about Peabody College.

Camilla P. Benbow
Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

As a world-class college of education and human development, Vanderbilt’s Peabody College has many facets. In classroom teaching, for example, we seek to prepare tomorrow’s leaders. In other settings, we strive to help those who are already hard at work develop their professional knowledge and skills. Central to both of these activities is the discovery and sharing of new knowledge by expert faculty conducting groundbreaking research.

In fact, Peabody serves the nation as a research leader—in education, in policy, in human development and in organizations and communities. Our research expenditures for the last fiscal year exceeded $32 million. Only a handful of institutions in the country have that kind of impact, and impact is what we are looking for. This issue of the Peabody Reflector showcases a number of instances where Peabody researchers are building bridges between a growing base of theoretical knowledge and its practical application in settings from classrooms to communities.

On campus, the ideal of community has been elevated to a new level with the opening this year of The Commons, bringing together all first-year students in 10 residence halls on the Peabody campus. The Commons is the result of a decade of planning, construction and program development intended to acclimate first-year students to university life, to ensure their well-being and to instill a love of learning and service. Professor Sharon Shields has been living in The Commons as a faculty head of house, and she shares her insights about the experience.

To be sure, these are challenging times, but they are laden with opportunity. The practice-orientation and hands-on experiences that have long characterized Peabody’s academic programs will benefit our students in the years to come. Regardless of the short-term difficulties which must be surmounted, we are confident, as ever, that education provides the best long-term solution. Members of the Peabody community—including alumni and parents—share this vision. We have surpassed our campaign goal of $60 million, and we have a new goal of $75 million. Reaching the initial campaign goal is an amazing feat, one that we could not have accomplished without the entire Peabody community. 

Camilla P. Benbow

Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development

In an ideal world, of course, our politicians consider themselves servants of the people. And every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns bring out the idealist in all of us. They rouse our hopes and dispel, if only for a time, jaded thoughts about the messy actual practice of government. We make a fresh investment in the candidate of our choice, cautiously optimistic that he (or she, someday) will take seriously his commitment to serve the will of the people.

Being a school of education and human development, in this issue we offer a primer on the two major candidates’ views on education, including NCLB, school choice, incentives, early childhood and higher education. Education is an important issue for almost all of us, though not necessarily an overriding one. We hope readers will find useful information to consider as we head to the polls. Needless to say, we are making neither endorsements nor predictions!

Outside the Beltway, Peabody people are changing the world in entirely different ways, and not just in our traditional education disciplines. Elizabeth Davis, Brooke Vaughan and Palmer Harston are taking knowledge and skills they hewed as human and organizational development majors to heal the wounds of the Rwandan genocide; strengthen African education, environment, and health; and work with South African children orphaned by AIDS. Current HOD students recently returned from a hands-on service trip to Manenberg, South Africa, coordinated through the Vanderbilt Initiative for Scholarship and Global Engagement.

Closer to home, Emily Thaden, a doctoral student in community research and action, created a photo project involving the children of one of Nashville’s public housing neighborhoods. Amy Cate and Melissa Brock, two education alumnae, were honored with Middle School and Elementary Teacher of the Year Awards from Metro Nashville Public Schools.

So if you are still looking for a place to invest your hope, and you are not entirely confident that politics offers the best avenue, might I suggest the students and alumni of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College? They inspire me every day.

Camilla Benbow
Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development