The Teaching of Psychology in Autobiography: Perspectives from Exemplary Psychology Teachers Edited by Trisha A. Benson, Caroline Burke, Ana Amstadter, Ryan Sidey, Vincent Hevern, Barney Beins, & Bill Buskist.
39 Reflections on My Career Journey as a Teacher of Psychology Ann Garrett Robinson Gateway Community College pp. 267-274

I am a Professor Emerita of psychology at Gateway Community College, having joined the faculty when it was South Central Community College in 1972. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999. I am probably best known in my professional teaching career for my community service-oriented and culture-conscious teaching, my national leadership roles in Psi Beta (the National Honor Society in Psychology for two-year colleges) are also widely recognized. I was its 4th president (1987-1990) and its first historian. During my presidency, Psi Beta was affiliated with the American Psychological Association (APA) and it laid the groundwork for offering many leadership awards.

I earned my bachelor's degree in psychology at North Carolina Central University in 1954; my master's degree in clinical psychology from Wayne State University in 1957; and my doctoral degree in education from Nova Southeastern University in 1975. I practiced clinical psychology in North Carolina, Maine, and Indiana and worked as a Certified Psychological Examiner in Connecticut. I also served on the faculty of the Child Study Center of Yale University and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. I taught psychology for 27 years at Gateway Community College.

I undertook governmental research in the area of Action's Special Volunteer Programs. My continuing education included the study of applied anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University and I also conducted fieldwork at the Kenya Christian Home in Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa. I was appointed a post-doctoral research fellow in African and African American Studies at Yale University and a Research Fellow at the Yale University School of Divinity.

I have contributed articles to the New Haven Register, as well as to other newspapers. Ebony Magazine cited my research on the study of the three wives of Booker T. Washington. I served as a local historian on local radio and television shows; my life history collections on religious leaders can be found in various places, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

I have received many awards and honors including the prestigious 1992 Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP; Division Two of APA) Teaching Excellence award for two-year colleges (now called the Moffett Award), a Recognition award from the American Council of Honor Societies, a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition in 1995, a State of Connecticut General Assembly Citation for my scholarly research and contributions as a community-based teacher in 1999, the Seton Elm and Ivy Award for contributing to increased understanding and cooperation between the City of New Haven and Yale University in 2000, a Connecticut Community College system post-retirement award for excellence in service in 2001, and a front-page media tribute for outstanding community services from the Inner City newspaper of New Haven. In 2001, Psi Beta presented its first annual Ann E. Garrett Robinson College Life Award. Thus far, awards have been presented to community college students and/or faculty in psychology in Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois.

As a retiree, I volunteer as the founding curator of the Little Red Brick Schoolhouse Museum in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple of New Haven. I serve as an ordained deacon at the Immanuel Missionary Baptist Church in New Haven. I also continue to support the advancement of psychology through my participation in the President's Circle of Psi Beta and Psi Chi Honor Society in Psychology.

My Early Development as a Teacher

My career path was influenced by my childhood and youthful experiences. I grew up in a segregated, village-like community in the years leading up to World War II. I was privileged: I was reared and nurtured in a family by influential parents and close relatives who worked in teaching and various trades, including publishing and printing. My primary role model was my mother, a public school teacher who had attended a junior college-which she loved-as an adult learner. My father, also a brilliant individual, was a skilled printer for a local daily newspaper and later for a private business.

My family called me a "library child" because I spent so much time in the George Washington Carver Library with a favorite aunt who founded the library. In my private moments, I explored many career options, dreaming of becoming a physician or a lawyer or a dramatist or a great writer.

I can recall the day I made the decision to become a psychologist (Robinson, 1994). I was a senior in high school. I noticed an opportunity in psychology posted by the Veteran's Administration on the high school bulletin board. I suddenly knew with a certainty that I was going to become a psychologist, even though I had no objective basis for selecting psychology as a career--I was unacquainted with psychology as an academic discipline. Before 1950, psychology historians report that there few African Americans worked as practicing psychologists and even fewer worked as teachers of psychology. (Denmark & Fernandez, 1992; Guzman, Schiavo, & Puente, 1992).

With a spirit of adventure, I headed off to college and met my first role models in psychology, two African Americans: Carol Bowie and George Kyle. Both had practiced clinical psychology but became college teachers of psychology later in their careers. My career would follow a similar path.

In 1972, I joined the college faculty of Gateway Community College as an assistant professor. I was later promoted to associate professor, and made a bit of history by becoming the first woman in the state's community college system to achieve the rank of full professor. In the beginning of my teaching career at Gateway, I felt like a missionary going into unsettled but promising educational territory (Robinson, 1985). At the time, I was the only psychology faculty member and the assistant chairperson of the social science department, which had 10 faculty members. Some mysterious event had happened the year before my arrival and the all psychology faculty departed, leaving behind the entire psychology curriculum, which included Introduction to Psychology, General Psychology, Child Growth and Development, Behavior Modification in Learning, Group Dynamics, Abnormal Psychology, Social Psychology, Theories and Methods of Counseling and Therapy, and Industrial Psychology. During my teaching career, I taught each of these courses.

I entered my first psychology classroom enthusiastic and over-prepared to teach introductory psychology. I had carefully crafted the syllabus and pre-rehearsed my lecture. I reassured my students that my text-based, multiple-choice tests would contain "no surprises." I also shared practical information about the location of the nearby college bookstore and the price of the introductory psychology textbook I had selected to use for the course.

I give credit to my students for awakening my awareness to their collective need for a non-traditional component in my course organizational plans. One day, two students, Mildred and Mabel, asked to bring their two teenaged daughters to class. I permitted them to do so, and much to my surprise, others followed suit and my classroom soon became transformed into a festive, family event.

Working at Defining Myself as a Teacher

My professorial role slowly changed from a teacher engaged in lecturing and testing for mastery of textbook material to a participant observer, a mentor, an educational facilitator, and a role model. I saw students in a new light, and started to notice them exhibiting previously unrecognized talents and gifts, skills, and attitudes. I soon realized that students play many roles in accordance within the social context of their everyday lives. Teaching diverse adult learners requires course opportunities for role diversification and for the expression of multiple intelligences and practical intelligence. From that time forward, I started learning how to include non-traditional components in my psychology course plans. One new project was a Psychology Holiday Symposium at which students made presentations and to which they invited their families-and I brought my family, too.

My intention in developing the Psychology Holiday Symposium and other student-related events was to help students learn about psychology and to insure that their work and their performances reflected competence. I wanted my students and, indeed, the college to project positive images. Together, we even maintained a dress code-the students in particular wanted the Psychology Holiday Symposium to be a dress-up event. Throughout the years, thousands of community members attended these Psychology Holiday Symposium and similar events. The early history of the Psychology Holiday Symposium has been recorded in writing, providing a brief but nevertheless compelling narrative referencing each student project and the perception of the teacher's role (Sullivan, 1974).

As my commitment to non-traditional teaching continued to grow, I also became interested in adult learning and community college education. I was accepted in the Nova Southeastern University's off-campus doctoral program for community college educators. Nova's unique three-year program was based on a hybrid curriculum consisting of courses related to traditional and non-traditional teaching strategies exclusively designed for community college educators. This curriculum included three-month seminars in educational policy systems in higher education, curriculum development in higher education, learning theory and applications,college governance, societal factors, and applied educational research and evaluation. In addition, the Nova program required each graduate student to conduct a research project (also known as a practicum) relevant both to our disciplinary area and useful to the college each semester. The practicum was based on the modules being studied in the formal classroom.

I developed my dissertation to meet a pressing need of the South Central Community College system: The system was not satisfactorily meeting the needs of the community, enrollment figures were low, and faculty might lose their jobs. My dissertation thus involved developing a new curriculum, teaching methods, and educational materials for social science. I invented a concept of a "Community Service Laboratory," which could be attached to 13 social science courses. I called this effort a community service-oriented curriculum.

My dissertation represented one of the most complex, far reaching, and rewarding curriculum creations that I ever undertook. It was successful. Without producing trauma or crises, it created institutional changes in registration procedures, administration and governance, grading, professional staff development, curriculum planning, community service programming, and public relations. It helped to save faculty jobs by generating more full-time enrollment figures, assisted the college in meeting the legislatively-expected community service needs of the local community through the volunteer activities of the enrolled student participants, provided workshops for faculty in the attempt to help them better understand community services as a part of its role and functions, and reconstructed the curriculum to include community-service laboratories. The adult learners who completed these laboratories were significantly more satisfied with these new course arrangements than with traditional course arrangements (Robinson, 1975).

In short, the Nova experience exposed me to a plethora of new ideas and exciting discussions about community college education. I read about the great men and women in this emergent pedagogical field. I also learned a great deal more about effective teaching.

The pathway I followed after receiving my doctorate from Nova was distinguished by steady growth and development as a teacher, writer, producer, and agent of institutional changes. I started to understand the nuts and bolts of teaching adult learners, and learned always to put my students first. My classrooms brimmed with a rich diversity of people who differed in almost every way imaginable, which lent valuable resources and challenges to my teaching and my students' learning experiences.

I am delighted to see my students' successes. They earned their associate degrees and moved on to earn BAs, MAs, LPNs, or RNs. Some of my students even went further and pursued doctoral degrees. I heard wonderful stories about my students who went directly into the workplace and climbed ladders of success (Robinson, 1985).

The Examined Life of a Teacher

I believe that the starting perspective for examining my life as a teacher is that I perceived my students as capable human beings, created in a divine image, and born with natural intellectual endowments that made them all worthy of being taught, uplifted, ennobled, and praised. I believed that experience more so than inborn differences is the key to individual student development and academic competence. I believed that students can learn and that teaching causes learning. Acting on these beliefs, I organized a curriculum and created culture-conscious classroom spaces where each student had a chance to learn and grow (Robinson, 1989).

My ideas about teaching were drawn from many philosophic systems including behaviorism, idealism, humanism, progressivism, and most especially the teaching beliefs of the educational philosopher, Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). Washington's philosophic system included a 3-H teaching method that required the teacher to educate the head and heart as well as train the hands of learners in order to provide them with opportunities to acquire knowledge and achieve academic, vocational, and personal competence (Washington, 1966; Robinson, 1981). Washington's ideas about the 3-H teaching method were apolitical, and this teaching method is universally applicable to all students enrolled in any academic program of study (i.e., occupational, technological or liberal arts).

As time progressed, I built on my ideas about the usefulness of the 3-H teaching method, adding to this teaching technique some teaching strategies based on Gardner's ideas about multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983; 1985). As I gained teaching experience in my already-assumed roles of teacher as authority, teacher as expert, teacher as facilitator, and teacher as role model, I expanded my teacher typology to include teacher as socializing agent, and teacher as person (Mann, et al., 1970). These new roles released me to find more effective ways to express myself in the context of even more relevant teaching approaches.

For example, in the role of teacher as person, I created aesthetic experiences to bring beauty, attractiveness, and pleasure into the classroom; I rearranged moveable furniture to form a perfect circle as the physical context for teaching values of equality and respect. In the role of teacher as socializing agent, I used administrative skills and organizational acumen to advise members of the Psi Beta honor society about careers in psychology. I encouraged these students to maintain academic excellence. I helped them to sponsor the most elegant college life events, which, other than commencement exercises, attracted the most students and families to the college.

To study these "classrooms without walls," I used an ethnographic approach, maintained a teacher's diary, assigned students to keep a daily course journals-I reviewed over 1,000 such reports, and I supplemented this information with anecdotal reports, interviews, peer reviews, research evaluation reports, videography, and archival data. Overall, my students were satisfied with the course experiences and so was I, in my roles as teacher.

I learned that problems emerge in association with the kaleidoscopic experience of teaching in a community college. What works for one group of students might be less effective with another group. I have a few suggestions for teachers facing these inevitable challenges: Maintain a core value system that includes versatility and flexibility; and attend professional development activities such as national conferences, workshops on excellence in teaching, and continuing education classes to learn new approaches to teaching in changing places. Celebrate the history of community college education in America (Bogue, 1950) and its prehistory, which can be traced back to July 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the First Morrill Act into law, thereby inaugurating the movement towards universal access, open admissions, community orientation, and program diversity in higher education (Robinson 1984).

Advice for New Teachers

Education is a praxeological science, guided by many shoulds and should nots (Wolman,1965). Here are some propositions that might be helpful to young teachers as they begin to hone their craft:

1. Create a climate in which everyone feels special and all are welcome.
2. Believe that all students have a God-given capacity to learn, no matter what their starting point.
3. Carefully prepare for discussions in order to enable students to become informed and open-minded thinkers.
4. Value honesty and caring.
5. Organize learning experiences that help students to grow in pride and self-respect.
6. Know the importance of cultural and ethnic factors in the life of a student.
7. Gain an increased understanding of how to bring forth the natural intellectual endowments of students.
8. Discover that education is a reciprocal process. Become a good learner and expect to learn from students. Expect great things of students and of yourself.
9. Accept learning is a lifelong process. Continue to study and plan for the future.

Final Thoughts

Though now retired from fulltime teaching, I continue to engage in teacher-related projects associated with psychology. I participated on behalf of Psi Beta Honor Society in the 75th Anniversary Celebration of Psi Chi at Yale, and I speak with students in the educational pipeline about my career journey. I indicate to my audience the truths of my career experience-I have had a rich life of personal and professional growth as a teacher of psychology and a rewarding sense that I was developing in a way that allowed me to be of benefit to my students, the college, my community and profession. They were great years!

References

Bogue, J. P. (1950). The community college. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Denmark, F. L. & Fernandez, L. C. (1992). Women: Their influence and their impact on the teaching of psychology. In A. E. Puente, J. R. Matthews, & C. L.Brewer (Eds.), Teaching psychology in America: A history (pp. 171-178). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (1995). The development of competence in culturally defined domains: A preliminary framework. In N. R. Goldberger and J. B.Veroff (Eds.), Culture and psychology (pp. 222-244). New York: New York University Press.

Guzman, L. P., Schiavo, R. S., & Puente, A. E. (1992). Ethnic minorities in the teaching of psychology. In A. E. Puente, J. R. Matthews & C. L. Brewer (Eds.), Teaching psychology in America: A history (pp. 189-217). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Mann, R. D., Arnold, S. M., Binder, J. B., Cytrynbaum, S., Newman, B. M., Ringwald, B., Ringwald, J., & Rosenwein, R. (1970). The college classroom: Conflict, change, and learning. New York: Wiley.

Robinson, A. G. (1975). The effects of a community service-oriented curriculum on alienation, perceived student role and course satisfaction in community college students (Doctoral dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, 1975). (Report No. EDO-JC- 770-160). Washington, D.C.: Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED135431)

Robinson, A. G. (1981). The psychology art exhibit and the imaginary tour by a historical personage. Communitas, Journal of Connecticut Community Colleges, 1(3), 20-23.

Robinson, A.G. (1984, August/September). Are the doors to higher education starting to close? Focus Magazine (pp. 10-11). (Hartford Inquirer, 3281 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut 06120).

Robinson, A. G. (1985, April 26). Community college is carving out its niche. New Haven Register, A7.

Robinson, A. G. (1989). Culture-conscious teaching: A case study approach. Community, Technical, and Junior College Journal, 60, 17-21.

Robinson, A. G. (1994). Psychology and community college teaching: Helping people in context. In P. A. Keller, Academic paths: Career decisions and experiences of psychologists (pp. 15-24). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sullivan, D. F. (Ed.). (1974). Psychology students stage 'Holiday Symposium'. Venture South Central Community College (pp. 56-57). New Haven, CT: Gateway Community College Library Archives.

Washington, B. T. (1966). The educational outlook in the south. In H. Brotz (Ed.), Negro social and political thought, 1850-1920 (pp. 351-356). New York: Basic Books.

Wolman, B. R. (1965). Clinical psychology and the philosophy of science. In B. R.Wolman (Ed.), Handbook of clinical psychology (pp. 3-37). New York: McGraw-Hill.

This page was first posted online on November 10, 2005 and was last updated on November 10, 2005

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