Teachers College Collective of Curriculum Professors

Teachers College at Columbia University has earned a reputation in the past century as a national leader [Page 871]in curriculum studies. During the early to mid-20th century, the institution resisted forming a dominant philosophic orientation or preferred epistemology. Widely recognized for its promotion of variations of progressive (experimentalist) education, fostered by the contributions of John Dewey, faculty members at Teachers College simultaneously advanced the “scientific” approaches to education advanced by E. L. Thorndike as well as the essentialist platform of W. C. Bagley and I. L. Kandel. The use of laboratory schools for experimentation with curriculum and instruction was widely emulated in other teacher preparation programs. By mid-century, Hollis Caswell promoted focus on school reform with the support of Alice Miel and Arthur Wells Foshay, and Florence Stratemeyer and the life adjustment curriculum offered an approach that combined elements of former oppositional perspectives at Teachers College. In the 1960s and 1970s, the insights offered by existential and personal explorations of curriculum, represented in the work of Maxine Greene and Dwayne Huebner, offered novel approaches to curriculum studies incorporating new philosophic orientations and the language of aesthetics.

A model of curriculum that had compatibility to the instructional models promoted by Thorndike was provided by David Snedden who championed the expansion of industrial training for adolescents through vocational schools and the inclusion of manual arts preparation introduced in the latter elementary grades. Snedden suggested that a curriculum be directed to production (vocation) and consumption (liberal arts), subdivided into specific skills (performance practices) and then again into a grouping (strands) of specific objectives. Snedden divided culture into seven divisions, each with its own set of values and knowledge. The most important form in U.S. society was vocational. Other cultural forms Snedden claimed merit a place in the curriculum are morality (interpersonal relationships), civics, religion, physical activity, euthenics (aesthetic appreciation), and humanities. Snedden contended social utility dictated the value of a cultural form to the curriculum, adapted then to the social contribution that a learner is likely to provide. Thus, curriculum assisted in promoting social classes based on economic production, recognizing the purposes of education are as varied as the social functions individuals are asked to perform. Division of disciplines was efficient and effective education.

From the college's inception, Dean J. E. Russell envisioned experimental laboratory schools to research and demonstrate cutting-edge curriculum and instructional models. The earliest association was with Horace Mann School, founded in 1887. A private tuition coeducational institution, Horace Mann attracted children of the professional classes and the expectation from parents was that the school would not treat their offspring as laboratory subjects. In an effort to establish a laboratory school representative of a typical urban population, the Speyer School was established. A tuition-free institution, the curriculum was envisioned as integrating traditional academic subjects with industrial arts. Frederick Bonser and Lois Coffer Mossman were recruited to establish the industrial arts curriculum for the elementary grades. The curriculum and the book that resulted from their work at Speyer became a standard reference on industrial arts training in the elementary schools, emphasizing Mossman's insistence that no skill be taught without resulting in the production of a final product. The Speyer experiment, however, did not capture the interest of leading Teachers College faculty and was abandoned when Lincoln School was established in 1917.

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