Oberlin College Teachers Academy

In 1986 Dean Wolfe, an associate professor of speech communication at Oberlin College, secured a three-year, $117,316 grant from the Cleveland Foundation to establish the Oberlin Teachers Academy. The grant followed a Cleveland Foundation-funded study of possible Oberlin-Cleveland linkages, which Wolfe conducted in 1984-85. In June 1986, 31 Cleveland-area secondary school teachers participated in the English, history or mathematics institutes offered by Oberlin College’s new academy. The academy’s Japanese travel seminar in 1986, lasting three weeks, engaged nine more teachers.

In the previous April and May, the academy sponsored five shorter, more narrowly focused classes for teachers. The titles of these weekend retreats were: Social and Scientific Issues in Genetics, The Playboy of the Western World, Concept and Experiment in Physics, Laser Technologies Now and Tomorrow, and Francophoniques.

The College’s activity in secondary education in the 1980s stemmed largely from President Frederick S. Starr’s recognition of two needs: the need for the College to increase ties with secondary educators and the need for it to strengthen ties with Cleveland. In late 1983 Starr suggested to Professor Wolfe that the Cleveland Foundation might be interested in funding partnerships with the secondary schools in greater Cleveland. A secondary goal of the academy was to broaden and strengthen relationships between Oberlin College and Cleveland-area educators. At the time, competition for top students motivated the College to seek partnerships with area teachers.

The emphasis of the Oberlin Teachers Academy’s summer institutes as well as the retreats during the regular school year was on traditional academic disciplines, not on educational theory or technique. That emphasis was intended to redress imbalances between the study of traditional academic disciplines and educational pedagogy in undergraduate teacher education. To accomplish that goal, the academy offered Cleveland-area educators with a genuine desire to expand their knowledge and expertise in their teaching disciplines access to Oberlin’s most prized resources: its outstanding faculty and its excellent library and other research and learning facilities.

When the funding from the Cleveland Foundation ended in 1992, the College closed the academy.  During the academy’s years of operation from 1986 to 1992, participating teachers came from nearly 200 different public, parochial, and independent high schools, most of them in northeast Ohio but some further away.

Sources Consulted

“An Oberlin Touch for Secondary-School Educators,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Fall 1986, 11-15.

“Town and Gown Merge in W. Dean Wolfe,” The Observer, 25 November 1993, 5.

Note written by Anne Cuyler Salsich.