Note's From Gray's Assessment of NDEA Institutes Report (1965/66)

Note: Now that I've reread my annotations from this report, the thing that occurs to me is the way Gray provides a larger context for understanding the challenges of teaching teachers, of teacher education. He provides a sense of perspective on the challenges of the work Murray was doing that, previously, I didn't quite grasp. 

I think that having read his report, I can see how Murray was uniquely qualified for the kind of work he was doing since he, himself, was not an entrenched member of an English department, committed to the discipline in the way that other college faculty members who directed or taught in NDEA institutes were. According to Gray, the entrenchment was the very thing that prevented substantive change. Murray's lack of entrenchment, however, was likely an asset to him, although who knows to what extent it could be operationalized, give that he was not the director of the NDEA institute at UNH and only one of the staff members, but an important one at that. 

I'm thinking the I might use Gray in the conclusion of this chapter, to try to put Murray's work in a larger context, although I also wondered, as I read his report, whether Gray might serve as an overarching framework for the entire chapter, starting it off with a quote or two from him or at least working him into the introduction in some way. I do think I need to use Gray in some capacity in this chapter. There are so many "choice" quotes from him that I cannot not use. Here they are:


In particular, the people who planned and taught in the institutes usually offered a conventional sequence of courses in language, literature, and composition and did not customarily experiment with new ways of teaching teachers. (p. 12 of Gray’s report)

Even the teacher of a workshop--perhaps especially the teacher of a workshop--must therefore be able to stand with authority where the participants cannot, in his subject rather than in their classrooms. But the opinions and speculations collected in the Pilot Study suggest taht an instructor in an institute compromises his effectiveness if he simply teaches his subject, just as he denies the institute if he concentrates on the pedagogy of his subject. He must here again walk a line between his interst in his subject and the participants’ interest in teaching it, and learn, as many of the faculty of the institutes of 1965 had yet to learn, how to lead the participants as students while remembering that they are colleagues (p. 14-15 of Gray).

There is no necessary virtue in novelty, and it is still necessary and useful to do as well or better what was well-done three years ago. But this tendency to reproduce patterns intended to educate secondary school teachers neglected the interest of the few teahers in the primary and intermediate grades who were enrolled in the institutes. (p. 15/16 of Gray)

There were other missed opportunities. Except for the necessary levies on departments of linguistics and schools of education, very few directors of institutes invited to their faculties , or enlisted as occasional lecturers, college teachers in other disciplines, writers, and other people engaged in similarly apt pursuits. (p. 16 in Gray).

 The directors of institutes at large universities frequently stated in their reports, or to the evaluators, that they foresaw no changes in the curricula of their departments in consequence of the institute. It is not difficult to conclude that in most departments of English, the NDEA institute slipped easily into a familiar slot. The faculty members who habitually agree to teach teachers agreed again to teach the kind of teachers they had taught before. However great the changes wrought in the participants, at the end of the summer the department and the institution were, at many large universities in particular, exactly as they were in the beginning. (Gray p. 16)

The institutes have not yet moved to realize their promise as instruments for chaining the ways teachers are educated in established undergraduate and graduate curricula. The college teachers of English who were concerned enough about these matters to plan and teach in the institutes of 1965 are still, for the most part, poised on the shallow shore of their engagement. They are not yet ready wholly to commit their energies and imaginations to adapting all they know and can do to be fully effective in the delicate task of teaching teachers. . They re not yet audacious enough, most of them, to break out of familiar patterns and to use the formulations of other disciplines. They are not yet persuaded, many of them, that one of the sources of the problem they have agreed to confront lies not before but behind them, in the courses they teach all during the academic year to students who will in a few years be teaching in classrooms like those of the teachers who come to the institutes. (Gray, p. 17)

An NDEA institute taught in the summer of 1965 was a special and identifiable kind of education. It tried to change the ways of teaching English in schools by educating teachers in the several facets of their subject; it tried to enlarge the competence of elementary and secondary school teachers by enrolling them in a curriculum largely prepared and taught by college teachers. Its purposes and character were not those of conventional graduate or undergraduate instruction, in which college teachers are responsible only that their subject is understood. Nor were its purposes and character those of conventional in-service institutes or seminars in which groups of teachers instruct one another in the difficulties and current practices of their profession. An NDEA institute was both liberal and professional. It proposed to teach the discipline of English, and it enlisted the talents of a faculty whose habit is to teach as if simply to learn about language and literature is sufficient reason to study them. It also proposed to teach teachers, and it necessarily enrolled people who were continually aware that the ultimate value of the institute lay not within how well they performed in its classrooms, but by how differently and well everybody in the institute performed in the classrooms to which they returned at the summer's end. If, in short, the institutes of 1965 did in general achieve a tone and identify of their own, they did so because they sought to achieve a character and purpose different from those of other ways of teaching English. (p. 20 in Gray)

It is clear that instructors in an institute must somehow address the participants as teachers as well as students of the discipline of English, and that therefore the habits learned in teaching college students, secondary school students, and courses in pedagogy are all inappropriate. (20)

As they are defined in the proposals and the final reports of their directors, the institutes of 1965 were planned to achieve two large and usually concurrent purposes: to instruct teachers of English in a new knowledge of and new attitudes towards their subject; and to confirm and enlarge the participants', and the instructors', sense of themselves as teachers engaged in the common task of teaching the same subject at different levels and in different ways. (p. 21 in Gray)

Institutes may serve during this revision as laboratories in which college teachers learn how to improve their own teaching of prospective teachers while they help to improve that of teachers in service. But as instruments simply for the teaching of the subject of English, they are fundamentally redundant. (Gray p. 21)

Institutes are not simply instruments for teaching English. They are also a means of teaching teachers of English.  (Gray p. 21)

This is a great quote to make a transition to the kind of work that Murray seems to have focused on post-1970s (i.e. teacher education at UNH): "The present necessity for institutes measures not only the inadequacy of the teaching of English in elementary and secondary schools but also the inadequacy of the teaching of English n the colleges which prepared the teachers themselves.