Miel, Alici

Alice Miel (19061998) served as an educational leader during the 1940s to the 1970s and symbolized the classroom teacher-university scholar who brought the spirit and practices of progressive education to higher education. Her scholarship in the field of curriculum revolved around her dissertation, later published as Changing the Curriculum, and brought the basic themes of democracy and cooperationreformulated and described as a social processto all activities of education and schooling. Miel accepted important leadership roles at Teachers College and in ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) and later helped to form the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction. Her career represents a particular type of curriculum academic who sought to maintain the principles of progressive education during the 1950s and 1960s, a period that did not embrace progressive ideals.

Miel taught Latin and French in Michigan public schools from 1924 to 1942. When asked in 1987 to identify her most important educational [Page 574]experiences, she mentioned teaching from 1930 to 1935 in the democratically administered school with G. Robert Koopman as principal and attending a 1935 Progressive Education Association workshop at Ohio State University where she met Laura Zirbes. Miel began doctoral studies at Teachers College in 1942 where Hollis Caswell, who had recently formed the first department of curriculum and teaching, served as her doctoral advisor. She remained at Teachers College as a professor of curriculum throughout her career, retiring in 1971 after having chaired the Department of Curriculum and Teaching from 1960 to 1967.

The significance of Miel's Changing the Curriculum, published in 1946, cannot be underestimated for the field of curriculum. As the Progressive Education Association was in decline and a new era of school consolidation was to begin throughout the United States, Miel wrote in opposition of what would become the standard curricular practices of the 1950s. She maintained that the curriculum should be seen as being in a constant state of change, and the intent of curriculum organization was not standardization and consolidation, but instead, a form of social changethat is, changing individuals' beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, and skills rather than merely changes in the configuration of course alignments and listings. She believed curriculum development and school experimentation would transform education at the district level; however, rather than using a simplistic structure for curriculum planning (such as the Tyler Rationale), Miel underscored the importance of the social process, constructive social purpose, democratic leadership, and cooperation and cooperative study. These terms, also drawn from the progressive classroom of the 1930s, blended the 1950s human relations movement with a dynamic conception of learning where many individualsteachers, students, staff, administrators, parents, community memberswere actively involved in the activities of the school. “Cooperating to learn and learning to cooperative” represented a motto that Miel believed would serve as an antidote to the standardization that was beginning to overtake the field of education and curriculum planning.

Greatly influenced by the Progressive Education Association's cooperative studies, Miel sought to incorporate the principles of the progressive classroom teacher-pupil planning and curricular experimentationinto the field of curriculum studies during a time of increased curricular standardization and the rise of the curriculum specialist-expert. She wrote specifically about the role of the curriculum expert-consultant in the democratic process of schooling, and while such titles created hierarchies in staff structures, she maintained that all educators should be viewed as experts, differing merely in degree and the kind of expertise (e.g., classroom teachers are experts by knowing particular children at particular stages of development). This belief would become especially important as school districts were beginning to call upon educational administrators to take on responsibilities as curriculum specialists. Although these curriculum specialists would have been armed with the Tyler Rationale, Miel reestablished the crucial role of classroom teachers and incorporated cooperation and human relations as a most important aspect of the social process of curriculum design and development.

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