Patrick Mattimore wrote:
> Perhaps this is the appropriate forum for this... perhaps not.
> I was struck by Dr. Jill Reich's article "Building
> Connections" in the April Monitor. Networks and connections between
> high school psych teachers and college faculty are a particular
> interest of mine. I will be attending the weeklong Partnership
> Project in June at James Madison University and as
> Dr. Reich pointed out in her article the Partnership Project
> is intended "to network psychology teaching and faculty at all
> levels." Aside from that rather general reference, that is the
> only even remote suggestion that Dr. Reich makes in her article
> that would seem to include high school teachers in the connections
> which she would like to see built. Rather, Dr Reich's
> entire article makes clear that the type of linkages she has
> in mind are horizontal ones- cross-departmental, possibly
> cross-institutional, but always at the college level. I would
> suggest that the type of linkages that are needed are vertical,
> starting at the top in kindergarten and working all
> the way down to our most privileged graduate level teachers.
I share the interest in "vertical linkages", though I don't currently have
the time/connections to expand mine outside of the four years of
undergraduate education (_not_ a comment on the relative importance of
levels of education!). In fact, this is at the top of my "to-think-about"
stack, given that I just re-read Annette Karmiloff-Smith's "Taking
Development Seriously" (Chapter One of "Beyond Modularity") for my learning
and cognition class.
I was under the impression that the main focus of the Psychology
Partnership Project was to be linkages between college and high school
teachers of psychology, so I'm surprised to hear about those linkages being
left out of the article. They were certainly the focus at the presentation
at APA last year (if I remember this correctly), with Carol Jo Dean and
Peter Petrossian. I didn't submit a proposal simply because I couldn't get
my act together with a local HS teacher in time to do anything. If I could
have written a proposal about connecting with other college departments I
could have done it in a single morning. I assumed that wasn't within the
domain of the Project.
I didn't read Jill Reich's article, but does it seem possible that she
simply wrote it in the middle of doing a thousand other things, and
temporarily forgot the focus of the "PPP"? After all of that talk last year,
I find it very hard to believe that "vertical linkages" could fail to be the
focus of the "PPP".
Paul Smith
Alverno College
