Assembly on Literature for Adolescents Loses a Pioneer

ALAN Review, Winter 2004 by Broz, Bill

This column is a tribute to a person whose life and career have been foundational professional resources in the field of Adolescent Literature and English Education, Dr. G. Robert Carlsen. Because I enrolled in the University of Iowa in 1968 and graduated for a third time in 1996, and am now a column editor for this journal, I was, so to speak, in the right places at the right times to help organize this memorial column. I took an M.A. seminar from Dr. Carlsen in 1975. The editors of The ALAN Review asked Richard F. Abrahamson to write the anchor piece and invited several of Dr. Carlsen's other doctoral students to contribute additional comments. My thanks to my fellow Iowa alums who contribute below.

An Educator Who Changed Lives

by Richard F. Abrahamson

University of Houston

Ph.D. University of Iowa, 1977

Dr. G. Robert Carlsen died on December 13, 2003. Born in Bozeman, Montana, in 1917, Bob received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota where he did his doctoral work with legendary English educator Dora V. Smith. In 1982 Carlsen retired after twenty-five years as professor of English and education at the University of Iowa.

Bob's scholarly work in the reading interests of young adults and adolescent literature form the underpinnings for much of today's thinking on reading stages, reading interests, individual response to literature, and the important role books for young adults can play in the creation of lifetime readers.

Books and the Teen-age Reader (Harper, 1967) melded Carlsen's theories with his real-world experiences teaching young adults. The result was a very popular book read by parents, teachers, and librarians. Books and the Teen-age Reader went into three editions and cemented Carlsen's stature in the field of English education.

In his role as English department chair at the University of Iowa high school, Carlsen pioneered one of the first English elective programs. His successful implementation of free reading classes at the school caused such individualized reading programs to pop up throughout Iowa and across the United States.

Carlsen served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English from 1961 to 1962 and was an early supporter in the creation of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. For his work in the profession, Bob won the NCTE Distinguished Service Award and the ALAN Award for outstanding contributions to the field of adolescent literature. But Bob Carlsen did so much more. he changed lives.

I made the trek from the woods of Maine to Iowa City and the University of Iowa because of Bob Carlsen's Books and the Teen-age Reader. A native New Englander, I started teaching high school in the northern woods of Maine armed with an M.A. in English, a thesis on Steinbeck, and the certain knowledge that high school seniors would sign up in droves for my senior seminar on Chaucer. The first book I was told to teach to sophomores was Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Imagine my sense of panic when I went to the local pharmacy (there was no bookstore) to try to buy a copy of the Monarch or Cliff's Notes for Conrad's book and found out they didn't sell them. For several weeks I stumbled through teaching that book. The students didn't like it, and neither did I. I was too new a teacher to know that this was the wrong book for the wrong students at the wrong time. I muddled through with more confidence than my students because left for me in the file drawer of my desk was the one-hundred-item multiple-choice test on Conrad's novel published by a company in Iowa. Those first few weeks of teaching I bluffed my students, and they bluffed me.

One weekend I stopped at the University of Maine bookstore and happened to pick up a copy of Books and the Teen-age Reader. I read it with the excitement of a desperate English teacher who feared he had chosen the wrong profession. In that book someone spoke to me for the first time about adolescents as real people with specific reading interests. These students weren't just empty vessels to be filled. Here was information for me about Havighurst and developmental tasks, subliterature, and adolescent literature. I ordered some young adult novels from one of the teen book clubs, put Conrad and his friends on the shelf, and started teaching with books the class agreed on. It was exciting. Students perked up, read more, and discussed more; I knew I had chosen the right profession.

My B.A. in English from the College of William and Mary and my M.A. in English from the University of Maine hadn't taught me anything about teaching English to adolescents. I just needed to know more. After a couple of telephone calls to Iowa, I was enrolled in Bob Carlsen's correspondence course on adolescent literature. I was hooked from the first assignment of writing my reading autobiography to submitting the fifty book cards. Toward the end of the course Bob wrote something on one of my papers asking if I'd ever thought about a doctorate. Three months later my wife and I rolled into Iowa City in our Volkswagen Beetle packed with everything we owned. It is fair to say, I went to Iowa because of Bob, Books and the Teen-age Reader, and adolescent literature. Bob Carlsen did for me what Dora V. Smith did for him: he was my mentor and my inspiration. he changed my life.