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Case Study as Common Text: Collaborating in and Broadening the Reach of History of Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
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A graduate school of education contains a wide range of disciplinary models for the training of scholars and practitioners. I encounter these models as they come up in conversation with colleagues and students, or I confront them more directly as I pass a clinical psychology laboratory space each morning on the way to my office. I often see small groups of doctoral students at work, huddled around a computer monitor or deep in discussion. As my psychology colleagues are more likely to research and write in teams rather than individually, I read this scene as a sign of collaboration built into graduate training. It also contrasts with my experience of collaboration, or the lack thereof, in my own graduate training in history. In my own education, the most collaborative spaces—in which people come together around a common text and problem—existed in the earliest phases of graduate school. A few students and a professor gathered around a seminar table to analyze a book or article. But later, as students developed their own research agendas and proceeded into the archives, they researched and wrote largely in isolation. Writing groups and other venues for sharing work were sustaining, but the content of research remained an individual affair. (There were hints, though, of new spaces for collaboration—as in the History of Education Society's research mentoring sessions begun in 2009—and likely others existed, but were unknown to me as a graduate student.) Once in a faculty position, reflecting on my graduate training and juxtaposed with what I perceived at the psychology laboratory led me to ask where collaboration fits and how it might matter in graduate training in the history of education.
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References
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2 Initially taught as Harlem Digital Research Collaborative, I regularized the class as Harlem Stories. The courses are cumulative to a degree, but students can choose to take one or both semesters. This flexibility is important for drawing students from other programs, especially in teacher education, where students often have limited space for elective offerings.Google Scholar
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13 A collection of materials from Wadleigh are held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of the New York Public Library system, and the school has an organized alumni network.Google Scholar
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