Chapter 11: The Story Behind the Presentation: Forrest Gump and Uncloistered Scholarship

This past summer, I was reading the book Dewey's Dream; Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform (Benson, Harkavy & Puckett, 2007). At the same time, an old colleague Tony was visiting me at our family home in Vermont. While out fishing, we reminisced about our first years together at Ohio State University and then our coincidental arrival at the University of Georgia (UGA). After 15 years at Georgia, he left for a Big Ten School and I remained for another 10 years (with a brief but valuable interlude at Texas State University). While fishing, Tony and I discussed in a joking manner the question of what our respective professional work had amounted to in this later stage in our careers. Days after the successful fishing expedition, I took the question as a focus point in developing a presentation titled Toggling Between Democracy and Education that I first gave at the 2007 AATC conference and then later at the John Dewey symposium at the American Educational Research Association on Uncloistered Scholarship and Community--School Engagement (Glickman, 2008). The following is my story. Ever since I served in the Teacher Corps in 1968 during the integration of schools in the rural south, I have been drawn to the role of education in a democracy. Later as a school principal in New Hampshire, our school community worked on the concept of democracy as central to our curriculum and, still later, with my university appointment in 1979, I and colleagues created a network of K-12 public schools in Georgia with this same emphasis. The network grew to over 100 schools and lasted for more than 15 years. We became partners with other major networks including the Coalition of Essential Schools, The Accelerated Schools, The Basic Schools, and The Democratic School Network. We found a cadre of university faculty across the nation willing to collaborate with public schools on how to assist schools to democratize themselves using the lens of action research, governance and what we have referred to as the pedagogy of democracy: connecting the education of students to their larger communities. Over this period, I became uncloistered in terms of the disciplines I accessed. I held successive appointments in five academic departments at UGA as I kept finding my interest being informed by faculty outside my college in fields such as political science, constitutional law, religion, anthropology, art, music, literature, economics, and history. For 1 year, I took a research leave to become a student at other universities throughout the country where I could visit and sit in on classes in fields far from my own. I never thought about working outside of my field as abandoning it but rather as building upon it. But, it has led to some befuddlement. I was simply following my intellectual heart by tapping into the ideas and imaginations of others. However readers of my earlier books on school discipline, supervision of instruction, and site based school leadership would become puzzled when they would approach me to speak on one of those earlier topics, and I would politely tell them that I do not do that anymore and instead, I would prefer addressing the issue of education and public purpose. In still following the same intriguing concept of education and democracy since my first year of teaching, the journey has taken me into then unimaginable settings. For example, I am a counsel to the legal team litigating against the state of Georgia for inadequate funding. I have served on the steering committee member of Kids Voting USA, and the National Commission on Service Learning (chaired by John Glenn). I am now on the steering committee of The National Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools (cochaired by Sandra Day O'Connor), and I am one of the founding conveners of a policy group called The Forum for Democracy and Education which has direct access to presidential candidates for the purpose of influencing federal education policy. …