A Teacher of Teachers Laura Zirbes:
By: Paul R. Klohr From Teachers and Mentors, Edited by Craig Kridel No reflection on Laura Zirbes turns out right without first casting her professional life into the lived context at Ohio State University during those years of her long tenure there. Her career is especially significant in the history of elementary education, for it documents the continuing struggle of that field of study to achieve recognition and professional status. Reid (1993) ably describes Zirbes in his biography, Towards Creative Teaching: The Life and Career of Laura Zirbes. He refers to her as one of the "Dauntless Women": a second generation of women leaders in education following several such greats as Patty Smith Hill, the prime mover of kindergarten. No epitaph more readily fits Zirbes. And as Reid asserts, "The ultimate reason for studying any person is to learn how he or she was important in her own times." I want to extend that to say, "And also, now."My memory of Zirbes as a significant influence in my own professional life fully supports both Reid's thesis and my own conviction of her contemporary value as a theoretical-historical bridge between then and now. I sense that such relationships between historically significant work and what we see as currently promising ideas tend not to be recognized. My first encounter with Laura Zirbes (I use "encounter," for that is the way one typically came to know her) was on a cold January morning in 1946. A large woman with her arms loaded with several big mailing tubes and other packaged materials, she was fumbling to open the heavy doors of Arps Hall, the College of Education building at Ohio State University. Here I digress to point out that this building was named after a former dean, George Arps, who had studied in Germany with Wundt, the father of scientific measurement of behavior. Some of us graduate students were almost certain that his ghost still lingered on the top floor, which then housed one of the nation's largest psychology departments, yearly turning out many of the professors of psychology who were staffing departments throughout the country in post-World War II America. Moreover, the building also housed a major research bureau headed by W. W. Charters with his activity analysis approach to curriculum development. On hand, too, were Edgar Dale and his associates with lists of words that children at different grade levels were able to recognize. This "word list" was the "scientific" basis eagerly sought by publishers of graded basic reading materials. Much of this Arps Hall aura was anathema to Zirbes. When I knew her, she had learned to live with the tensions of two worlds -- the so-called "scientific" world where she was officed and her own world which was, at that time, an alternative one which she was convinced was more fully scientific in the Deweyian sense of that term. Despite the tensions of these polarized views within the college, there was during the years of Zirbes' tenure a "civility" about the discourse among her colleagues. This contributed to a collegiality often rare in higher education in the 1990s. My offer to help Laura that January day was quickly taken in a transfer of part of her load to my arms as we moved into the Elementary Education Center, a ground-level space she had wrangled from the male-dominated administration in a time of a great shortage of classrooms on campus. "You are Klohr, aren't you?" she said, peering through the steamed-up, heavy lenses of her glasses. "[Harold] Alberty said you might come by." My hesitancy in meeting up with Zirbes and my initial awkward response to this chance encounter had roots in the myth, then widespread among the local graduate students, that there was a deep chasm between the two strong departments of elementary and secondary education. In pursuing doctoral work one must, if he or she were wise, pursue one or the other. To the contrary, my experience as a classroom teacher had suggested a doctoral program in curriculum should be both elementary and secondary. This proposed direction was strengthened by my observations