A Portrait of an ARSI Teacher Partner in Oneida, Tennessee

INTRODUCTION: The following report is one of three that depict what ARSI work looked like “on the ground,” that is, in actual small rural school districts scattered across Appalachia. It is a portrait of how the design, values and intent of ARSI played out in practice, in a specific place and time. We at Inverness Research Associates have deliberately used the term portrait as the title of these three individual reports, because they are very much about real people and how in their own hands they brought the ideas and goals of ARSI to the K-12 students in their local regions. To read an overview of the different roles ARSI educators filled and played within the project, please see the report titled “An Overview of ARSI: The Genesis, The Contextual Landscape, and the Model that Evolved.”

This first portrait is the story of a single ARSI Teacher Partner, Barbara Shoemaker, in Oneida, Tennessee. Through telling the story of one Teacher Partner this report illustrates how one of the major ARSI goals, to develop indigenous leadership capacity for math and science education improvement, occurred. Her particular experience instantiates and illustrates how ARSI’s “theory of action” played out across many of the ARSI districts through the work of the Teacher Partners.

The report focuses on the key design features of the ARSI Teacher Partner program and how these features contributed to Barbara Shoemaker´s personal and professional growth. Much of Ms. Shoemaker´s work consisted of helping administrators and teachers become aware of the national standards in mathematics and science as well as the pedagogy and teaching methodologies of constructivist and inquiry-based instruction. Additionally this report describes how Ms. Shoemaker´s applied the ARSI professional development design principles she herself had experienced to other related work she went on to do: the formation of a consortium of 11 additional school districts called the South Fork Local Systemic Change (LSC) which applied for and received a NSF pilot grant and worked together to establish elementary science programs.

A PORTRAIT OF AN ARSI TEACHER PARTNER IN ONEIDA, TENNESSEE

by Elizabeth Horsch and Barbara Heenan

The August 8, 2002 edition of the “Scott County News,” a weekly newspaper published in Oneida, Tennessee, features a front page article on Arlenia West. “88-Year-Old Arlenia (Arleny) West Named 2002 Farmer of the Year,” reads the headline. In a photograph accompanying the article is a picture of Arleny. Her gray hair is pinned back in a small bun and she is wearing a print dress and comfortable, moccasin-style shoes. She has both hands placed on her cane, and she is smiling broadly. In another picture we see her standing in her famous sweet potato patch well known throughout the county. It’s a patch of an unusual white variety of sweet potato started from slips her uncle gave her in 1935 and that she has maintained ever since.

Two years later, Arleny West and Barbara Shoemaker, the ARSI Teacher Partner from Oneida, sit on the sunny front porch of Arleny’s tiny cabin, chatting about Arleny’s early years in this remote Tennessee area. Arleny has lived on her farm since she settled there with her husband in the early 1930s. She lives alone now and farms her small place with little or no help. Barbara is a former secondary mathematics and science teacher whose husband also has his roots in this county. When Barbara asks about Arleny about early life in Oneida, she paints a revealing picture of growing up in this rugged, rural environment:

Alright, when we growed up it was a big family, there were 13 in all… We were raised on the farm, that is how we got our doing, selling stuff, butter and milk and eggs and things like that. And with a big family you had a hard time keeping us all something to wear. We always just had one dress in the summer time to wear when we went anywhere… .

Wasn’t no cars or nothing going then. The road was so bad you could hardly walk through. You had to get up on the bank where you could walk out of the mud… You ask about going to school… there wasn’t no way of going but walking then. The big snows would come and we would walk, get out and lay down in it and make prints on the way to school. Yeah, we had books. We had arithmetic and spellers and geography, I don’t believe they call it geography no more, something else, but we had all of those just like they do now… I was in 8th grade when I quit.

When their conversation scrolls forward to her life now, Arleny tells about digging 5 bushels of her famous sweet potatoes the day before. Barbara is incredulous. “You dug 5 bushels all by yourself?” Arleny responds:

I did. They might say they helping me a lot, but I cut that corn all up by myself. Nobody knowed I was cutting corn, nobody never offered help and then when it come time to gather it, they know and nobody showed up. I gathered all that corn…

There is a strong sense of kinship between Barbara and Arleny. Separated by generations, they are linked by a fierce independence, a relentless determination to achieve, and a mutual tie to this region of Tennessee. Barbara speaks of admiration for Arleny and her influence:

Arleny is fascinating. She is an independent, intelligent woman without any education. Even though she’s had a stroke she is still cutting her hay by hand. She is just so dynamic. I’ve always liked people like that, I’ve been drawn to her. To me Arleny is really what this whole area is all about. She represents what Scott County was built on…

This is the story of Barbara Shoemaker and her work as an ARSI Teacher Partner in Oneida, Tennessee. It is the story of what she values and the experiences that shaped her approach to education. In particular it is about what she learned from her experience with the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative, and how she passed on those lessons to other teacher leaders in Appalachia.

We have chosen to tell her story because it illuminates the ways in which ARSI invested in individual teachers, and how, in turn, those individuals contributed to the overall leadership capacity and improvement infrastructure for mathematics and science education in Appalachia.

The Beginning: Teaching in Oneida Special School District

Oneida, with a population of roughly 3000 (and 18,000 in the county), is about an hour north of Knoxville, and just a little further north from Huntsville, the county seat of Scott County. “Scott County must be one of the most historically unusual counties in the United States. The original settlers were veterans of the American Revolution who were awarded grants of land on the Cumberland Plateau as reward for their service. This detail is not quite so unusual as the remarkable fact that when the Civil War erupted and Tennessee seceded from the Union, the leaders of Scott County acted to secede from Tennessee! Perhaps this history accounts in some measure for the maverick status of the Oneida Special School District. In 1915 a bill was passed in the Tennessee state senate establishing an independent Oneida school district within Scott County, and opening enrollment to “eligible students across all of Scott County.”

Today the Oneida schools are known for the performance of their students on state achievement tests. The Oneida School District ranks among the top school districts in the state and parents from outside the district boundaries bring their children to its schools because of its reputation for student achievement. Although it is funded by the county, as well as through a special tax on the residents of the school district, it also receives thousands of dollars each year from a local industrialist-philanthropist whose gifts are deliberately aimed to serve as an incentive for the improvement of the district’s student test scores.

Barbara Shoemaker began teaching at Oneida Middle School in 1991. Previously she had run a successful landscaping business, but she decided to try teaching so that she might have more time to spend with her young family. As a new teacher she developed a reputation for her energy and for her outspokenness about education and how students learn. She became known as “Have Class – Will Travel” because of her passion for outdoor education, and her insistence on taking her students, out of the classroom and into the community for field trips and other kinds of educational experiences. “We went all over, every year, because I wanted the kids to see what all was out there.”

Barbara had only been teaching 4 years when she became involved in ARSI.

The way I got into the ARSI program was kind of funny. I am learning now though that it’s not an unusual story around ARSI school districts. Before ARSI, when the Appalachian Educational Lab offered programs on math standards, I had volunteered to go… that meant that when the envelope from ARSI came (to the school) with the word Appalachian on it, they thought it was the same thing and they gave it to me. So I attended the first ARSI meeting, and that is how I became the ARSI teacher partner in Oneida. That is par for the course in the way teachers are chosen for these events.

ARSI was one of the few professional development opportunities that Barbara had ever had. She recalls it as a dramatic break from the bleak professional landscape which she had experienced. Barbara explained:

When you start teaching in a small school, in a small area especially, there’s a lot for everyone to do. I was an 8th grade science teacher, a 9th grade science teacher… I taught physical science, and also taught 7th grade math. And I was also the chairperson of the science fair, summer enrichment, homebound teacher. So there were a lot of hats you wore and you didn’t have time for anything professional. You really don’t. I had no professional growth, other than what I would get during the summer.

Just prior to becoming the ARSI Teacher Partner Barbara Shoemaker had been asked by the supervisor of instruction in the district to become involved in some curriculum work. It whetted her appetite for more professional development.

You know actually, that was the first time I think I ever was involved in any curriculum. Up until that point, I had never had any training or any idea of what curriculum was. Then, I started working with the Appalachian Educational Lab because I chose their workshops. They were doing workshops across the region on the national standards and I went to a couple in Nashville -- I was enthralled with the activities. Coming to education with my background, I saw more need for application. Students needed to do more than sit down with a book. I saw a need for students to try to figure it out for themselves. And so that was one thing that really intrigued me—the national standards--that specifically addressed that kind of learning…

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