Assembly on Literature for Adolescents Loses a Pioneer

ALAN Review, Winter 2004 by Broz, Bill

In the end, it seems only right that I should give Bob the last word. In the final professional article he wrote, Bob summed up his fifty years of teaching this way.

I have been fairly consistent in my point of view throughout my fifty years in teaching. I always favored the teenage book over the literary canon, speech over writing, expression over grammar, intensive exploration over close reading, process over product, and what literature does over how it is constructed. One summer, it must have been about 1950, while I was teaching a course at the University of Colorado, a New England teacher in my class said, 'You just can't be right or we would have heard about it in Massachusetts.' Still, I have held the faith in my beliefs about teaching English although sometimes, just sometimes, I speculate whether New Englanders have yet heard the message. ("Conclusions from Fifty Years of Teaching English," in Literature Is Collected Essays by G. Robert Carlsen, edited by Anne Sherrill and Terry C. Ley, Sabre Printers, Johnson City, TN, 1994, p. 272)

The Teaching Goes On

by Terry C. Ley

Auburn University, Emeritus

Ph.D. University of Iowa, 1974

I recently bought a copy of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie to give to Josh, a college-aged friend, for Christmas. At home, I reread portions of the book before wrapping it. Reflecting on how Morrie Schwartz, Mitch's college philosophy professor twenty years earlier, affected Mitch's adult perspective on life through the series of meetings that they had just before Morrie's death, I thought about my own mentors. Those who have shaped my life by detecting my potential as a teacher and challenging me to become the best teacher I could become are a group very dear to me! Prominent among those mentors is Bob Carlsen.

Dr. Carlsen was my advisor and major professor for my master's and doctoral work in English Education at the University of Iowa. While working under his guidance to redesign English language arts curricula for Cedar Rapids (Iowa) secondary schools, where I taught, I admired his leadership style, how he led diverse and sometimes recalcitrant teachers through negotiations that resulted in innovative curricula of which we could be proud. Watching him operate successfully on my home turf, with teachers I knew, kindled my desire to become a teacher educator, specifically, an English teacher educator. On campus, watching Carlsen function as a professor, researcher, advisor, and national leader in our field helped me to shape my perception of what I might do as a professor of English education.

When I began my graduate work with him, Dr. Carlsen helped me to assess my academic and professional strengths and to fill gaps of knowledge and practice that I wanted to fill. The relationship between doctoral student and major professor generally becomes a very close one, especially throughout the dissertation process. Doctoral students pray that their major professors will be helpful and benevolent. Surely I did, and Dr. Carlsen was the ideal person to help me deal with my initial reservations about myself as researcher. We explored research topics together, settling on one that intrigued both of us; after I gathered my data, we solved problems about data analysis together; he read and responded kindly to several drafts of each chapter. With his help, I gained confidence in myself as a researcher, a professional role that I knew I must play if I wished to pursue a career in teacher education. Products of Dr. Carlsen's scholarship were both abundant and influential. Concepts that he taught me, especially about integrative language arts curricula, young adult literature, and directed individualized reading (a precursor to Sustained Silent Reading and Nancie Atwell's reading workshops) became keystones of my own teaching and scholarship, ideas upon which I built my own career.