Cross Case Features: Teachers

Wadsworth Middle School: Social Studies

Doris Bowman, Social Studies/Language Arts (Humanities)

Leadership

Doris Bowman’s dynamic personality, enthusiasm, and passion have served as a model for the team and have inspired her colleagues at Wadsworth Middle School. She was involved in the hiring of three Humanities teachers, forming the basis for the seventh-grade Humanities team. She became the team’s leader and leveraged resources to support the development of the Asian studies curriculum through a grant. She has built up an impressive resource collection for the team and its students.

Resource Collection

Doris Bowman’s classroom in Wadsworth Middle School is awash in Asian themes. Asian calligraphy covers the windows. The computers that line the walls of the room have names such as Confucius and Lao Tzu. Binders and boxes of Asia-related resources—novels, picture books, videos, posters, and textbooks—fill one wall of the classroom. Far surpassing the resources available through the school’s library, Mrs. Bowman’s resource collection is where both teachers and students come when they need information about Asia. An Art History elective, taught by Doris Bowman, includes one trimester of World Art History, which includes a focus on Asia.

Doris periodically holds a family movie night devoted to Asian film so that students and their parents and siblings can share the experience students are exposed to in the classroom. Students get extra credit for answering film-related questions. She has also posted many of the school’s Asian curriculum materials to her website, which is linked to the Wadsworth Middle School website.

NCTA Material in Classroom

An example of an exercise in Doris Bowman’s class on Communism includes the following: “I said that I was only going to assign a grade based on the average point earned in the class [rather than individual grades]. Of course, they freaked out because it’s grades....Then, eventually, through the course of the discussion, somebody says, ‘This is what happened during the [Cultural Revolution].’ And I said, ‘Bingo! You got it!’”

Students from Doris Bowman’s Advanced Social Studies/Language Arts class say that the course has given them a better understanding of Asia. Among the activities they liked are writing letters to the administrators of the Three Gorges Dam and playing the game Samurai Warlords. They say that the pictures Doris brought back from her study tours enlivened the material they were reading about in class.

Greg Duncan, Social Studies/Language Arts (Humanities)

Greg Duncan, a member of the seventh-grade Humanities team, had no experience in Asian studies when he arrived at Wadsworth Middle School as a first-year teacher. During his first year at Wadsworth, he participated in the NCTA seminar and became directly involved in the development of the Asian curriculum. Subsequently, he traveled to China with a study tour.

Greg identifies Doris Bowman as the key factor in putting the Wadsworth Asian curriculum in place: “She lit a fire for all of us.” Others praise Greg Duncan’s contributions to the team. The principal says, “Greg Duncan also has become a wonderful mentor to the other staff members.” In working with the Asia curriculum without the experience of the NCTA seminar, one non-NCTA team member says that he tries to “stay on the same page as Greg” and that he and Greg meet “quite regularly, and he’ll come in and check on me. We’ll sit down and share notes.”

Bruce Pearl, Social Studies/Language Arts (Humanities)

Bruce Pearl is a third-year teacher at Wadsworth Middle School. Until this year, he was a member of the seventh-grade Humanities team. This year, he moved to the eighth-grade level where he teaches U.S. history. One of his goals in his new position is to try to recreate the same sort of team environment that he enjoyed at the seventh-grade level. Prior to his participation in NCTA, Bruce Pearl had little experience with Asian studies. He had only taken one community college course. He participated in NCTA during his first year as a teacher. He has since traveled to China and Japan with the study tours.

To the degree possible, Bruce Pearl is interested in teaching his U.S. history classes with an Asian perspective (e.g., Japanese internment, westward movement and Chinese immigration, WWII, etc.). Bruce views the Asian curriculum as particularly relevant to students, emphasizing that a knowledge and understanding of Asia may prove useful in the future as a career path.

Marcia Vernon, Social Studies/Language Arts (Humanities)

Marcia Vernon, a member of the seventh-grade Humanities team at Wadsworth Middle School, had little prior knowledge of Asia when she began her career as a teacher. She had taken only one college course on the “Peoples of Asia” as an anthropology minor. The team’s collaborative framework helped her get up to speed quickly, despite having a limited knowledge base. She is ready and willing to share what she has learned with others who join the team: “Now I feel as new teachers come in, I can help them.”

NCTA had a significant impact on Marcia in terms of her confidence as a teacher: “When I went to the NCTA class, I remember feeling very insecure. There were a lot of people in the class who had previous knowledge, and I came in with an empty head…. The first year when I was talking about the Cultural Revolution or Mao, I would have a note sheet up there that I could peek at. Now I feel confident that I can explain things without referring to notes. I didn’t have the confidence the first year.”