Portraits of Teacher Dedication in Vermont.
The authors of this study have concluded, after an extensive review of the literature and the testimony of numerous Vermont teachers, that dedication and commitment are useful terms to apply when discussing teacher outstandingness and teacher excellence, especially in rural context, and that there are measures which can be quantified of these attributes. It may be that higher levels of teacher dedication or commitment are present in either end of the population spectrum among the very rural and the very urban. It is believed that measures of teacher commitment and dedication could include teacher time and teacher wealth. Outstanding or excellent teachers in Vermont over time have spent their own money and have given great quantities of discretionary time to their students in support of improving education. The authors of this paper became interested several years ago in teacher motivation, teacher commitment, and teacher dedication. Several literature searches spaced throughout the 80's up into the early 90's showed that, although there was some interest in teacher commitment, no work had been done in the area of teacher dedication, especially as it related to teacher quality, teacher effectiveness, and teacher excellence. In spite of the lack of research, words like commitment and dedication are often used in research on teaching and teacher motivation. The authors ccncluded that this phenomena was worthy of further investigation and set out to develop a design. Vermont, which at the time that field research was completed, was the most rural state in the nation. It seemed an excellent place to begin for several reasons. There was a readily identifiable population of teachers who had been labeled by their peers and administrators as excellent or of high quality. These teachers were those who had been selected for recognition by the University of Vermont through its Outstanding Teacher program run annually since 1981. By 1990, almost 800 Vermont teachers had been singled out for this accolade. A search of archival sources led to several diaries and previously unpublished works related to teachers and teaching in Vermont and Northern New England housed at both the Wilbur Collection at the University of Vermont and the Vermont Historical Society Museum in Montpelier. The existence of the second pool of information stimulated the researchers to develop a two-stage case study using the archival data for the first set of cases and eighteen purposefully selected teachers as the second set of cases. Thus, a qualitative design emerged using the two-stage case study mentioned above and incorporating purposive sampling techniques. Among the descriptors associated with rurality are remoteness, loneliness, scarcity, and lack of opportunity (Matthes and Carlson, 1987).
America's Country Schools
The country school has assumed an almost iconic status in the American landscape. It is difficult to think of an architectural form that signals its function — or former use — as tellingly as the oneroom school. When lecturing to beginning geography students on reading the landscape for clues to settlement change, Ishow slides of relict features like canal locks and interurban rail beds as well as examples of adaptive use: a gas station reborn as a drive-in bank, a bank as a storefront church, a police station as a restaurant, even a church near Cincinnati that has found new life as a Toyota dealership. But the buildings that students can always identify despite their newest incarnations are the one-room schoolhouses. Their forms are unmistakable. Yet, as Fred Schroeder notes in his eloquent Foreword to America's Country Schools:
The chromosomes of Chrysanthemum,
NEW varieties of the garden chrysanthemum arise primarily from seed. They are propagated vegetatively and many give rise to bud sports in sequence and in parallel to give whole families of varieties. The original sports would naturally be chimras and it is not surprising therefore that they often revert to the previous type. Whereas some varieties sport continually from the time of their origin, others remain stable for many years. Those considered in this account do, mostly, sport freely. Since varieties may remain stable for a considerable number of years and then suddenly sport it is probable that all varieties possess the ability to sport. The origin of bud sports is unpredictable. Some confusion in naming has arisen as the same or similar sports have occurred and been propagated in different places under different names. Consequently there are, for example, several forms similar to, but not identical with, the original Favourite Supreme raised by Messrs A. G. Vinten. It might well be that each individual variety would be better termed a sub-family to include all its minor variants. The different Chrysanthemum sports are described in scattered numbers of the R.H.S. Journal—more particularly, for the Favourite family, in Vol. 63, 1938, pp. 139-141. The object of this study is to discover the cause of sporting.