Brown is Gray for a Day
The air was unseasonably warm that spring day. The sky was blue, the cherry blossoms were pink, and Brown was Gray – Dr. Carol Brown, that is, who was named the 2008 recipient of the prestigious Nancy Gray Award at Rider’s University Day on April 10.
The award, named for Nancy Gray, former vice president for Development and University Relations, honors a member of the faculty or staff who exemplifies campus leadership, involvement, school pride/spirit and community service. It is awarded annually as the keystone event of University Day, which this year celebrated Memorable Moments in Rider History.
To Brown, the event was personally memorable as well. “Oh, I was very excited,” said the associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Education and Sciences, a post she has held since 1998. “It’s such a great thrill to receive the award. Nancy Gray was a special person and I’m very honored.”
While she is quick to recall Gray’s myriad of contributions to Rider, Brown has more than left her mark on the university landscape as well. Critical to her recognition of this year’s Nancy Gray Award were Brown’s efforts to land the School of Education’s renewed National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) certification this winter. This national accreditation, essential to college and university education programs, is held by just nine institutions in New Jersey, and Rider has maintained is status since January 1973. Its current accreditation is certified until Spring 2012.
In nominating her for the Nancy Gray Award, Dr. Donald Ambrose, professor of Graduate Education, said that Brown and the NCATE preparation committee faced a sterner test than they had in the past, but that Brown’s leadership was pivotal to achieving accreditation.
“While our school has been NCATE-accredited for some time now, the new criteria represent much more extensive and rigorous demands that are designed for large schools of education at elite universities with considerable resources at their disposal,” he wrote in his nomination letter. “Many smaller schools either don’t meet these standards or only meet them partially after great difficulty. Carol’s diligence, pride in Rider University, and facilitative leadership have been the key elements in our success.”
Ambrose continued to metaphorically compare Brown’s leadership through the process to that of a brigantine captain navigating the treacherous path around Cape Horn. “With Carol’s eyes on the compass and hands firmly on the tiller, we not only made it round the horn into more pacific waters, but we did so after meeting or exceeding all six of the arduous NCATE criteria,” he said. “Most small institutions that pass NCATE don’t meet all the criteria.”
“Our faculty deserves the credit,” Brown insisted. “They worked so hard on this and if I could share the award with all of them, I would.” Brown’s association with Rider goes back to 1970, when she began work as an assistant professor of education a year after earning an M.S. in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Though she resigned her faculty position in 1975 to devote more time to raising her family, Brown nonetheless maintained her affiliation with Rider as an adjunct professor. Interestingly, she also taught as an adjunct at Westminster Choir College from 1974 to 1979, years before the acclaimed Princeton school would merge with Rider, making Brown one of just a few who have taught on both campuses.
By 1987, Brown was ready to return to Rider full-time, and did so with a Ph.D. in Reading/Language Arts, again from Penn. “I was lucky enough to get my old job back,” she recalled. But not long before I did, the Ph.D. became a requirement for professorship, so I went back to school.”
Now, more than 20 years after her return, Brown has helped pushed Rider to the fore of the fight to advance developmental reading and writing. “For the past 10 years, I’ve devoted a lot of my energy toward the Trenton area National Writing Project (link: http://www.writingproject.org),” she explained. “Teachers from the Mercer County area come to Rider for our summer institute, where they work on their own writing and how they teach it to their students. The more they write, they more they realize what it takes to teach it to their own students. Essentially, it’s teachers teaching teachers.”
The National Writing Project, which was originally developed by the University of California at Berkeley, is now sponsored by approximately 200 colleges and universities, with three in New Jersey. “I’m very proud that it’s been refunded every year,” said Brown of the federally financed program. “I believed in one mission: lots of professional development that tells teachers what to do. This teaches them by using what they already know.”
In the 10 years Rider has hosted the National Writing Project, Brown has seen the lessons learned there come full circle through a number of familiar faces. “We’ve had more than 200 teachers attend the summer institute and some of them are area teachers who I taught when they were undergrads, including one of the current co-directors,” she said.
rown has also done a great deal of research into the use of inquiry-based science teaching and to improve science literacy, as opposed to employing rote memorization as a means of acquiring a series of facts, perhaps temporarily. “When I was a student, I memorized the specifics so I could answer the questions on the tests,” she explained. “But if you know what the answer is, there is little flexibility as far as how you reach it. The thinking here is that if you deeply understand a concept, there are different routes to each answer, and we don’t tell them what the answer is. It forces students to really explore the process and that’s how understanding is gained.”
Not unlike that method of learning is another basis of Brown’s research, using think-alouds as a tool for teaching and assessing reading comprehension. “The Writing Project works in a similar way, in concept,” she said, describing one practical application. “People don’t just suddenly write wonderful things. They need to comprehend the material and then construct meaning, and with think-alouds, they stop along the process and discuss their understanding that that point. Again, flexibility is key, and this teaches students how to be flexible in their thinking. Rigidity gets people in trouble.”
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