In Memoriam: Dennis Carlson

Dennis Carlson did not toot his own horn. In his understated manner, Dennis made his way in the world reflectively, intellectually, and with deep ethical and political commitments that drove his teaching, scholarship, political activism, and family life. He never stood on a soapbox, or led with his ego, but created vibrant communities of learning and activism with those around him throughout his life. These qualities made him a wonderful colleague and devoted teacher at Miami University for 24 years.

Much has been and will be written about my colleague's contributions to the fields of curriculum and educational studies, but few of these accounts will be able to narrate his contributions or his defining presence in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. I currently serve as chair of that department, and it is with honor and gratitude that I pen this tribute, and these memories.

Dennis came to Miami in 1990, hired in a Department of Educational Leadership that was undergoing a major, defining transformation. Dennis’ thoughtful presence, his power as a teacher and a scholar, and his great ability to contribute to an intellectual community would contribute much to this transformational effort. For many years, the department had delivered solid, well-taught programs in educational administration, curriculum, and college student personnel, preparing graduate students to assume positional leadership roles in schools and universities. In the mid- to late 1980s, faculty members engaged in deep conversations about how we could prepare students to transform schools in new ways that would make them more equitable, more democratic, and more just. When new faculty members were hired in the early 1990s to replace those retiring, faculty hires were consciously informed by this new departmental vision-in-the-making.

It was in this context that Dennis was hired as an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Miami in 1990 to teach graduate courses in curriculum studies. Although Dennis brought to us exceptional college teaching experiences as a doctoral student at University of Wisconsin, in his time as a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Rutgers University, Dennis had also gained classroom experience in a Boston elementary school, but even earlier, as a Peace Corps volunteer teacher of English in Libya from 1968 to 1970.

Dennis wrote movingly of these early experiences as an educator and political activist in his memoir, Volunteers of America: The Journal of a Peace Corps Teacher (Carlson, 2012). This volume documents the ways Dennis moved through the world as a young man during the pivotal years of antiwar protests in 1968 and, afterward, as a Peace Corps volunteer, engaging in deep learning, social critique, and quiet yet powerful activism. During his Peace Corps training, where he was learning teacher-centered teaching strategies from his orientation leaders, he was reading about student-centered pedagogies that would help students learn English in ways that would be more empowering to them. During his time in the Corps as a teacher of English in a small village in Libya, Dennis learned early lessons about how to be an advocate for students, to learn with them, and to create learning environments where students could develop their own authentic voices. These early lessons involved critically thinking about, and often rejecting, what the official Peace Corp curriculum advocated for its teachers of English. These early experiences sharpened his thinking about the paradoxes of education, as a tool for progressive enlightenment as well as for post-colonial domination. Dennis was fully aware of, and struggled with, the fact that teaching English to Libyans was, in some ways, an agenda fueled by corporate interests for English-speaking oil workers in North African countries. But he became attuned, as a teacher of young men in the village schools, to how his teaching might enable them to think, dream, and live their own lives amidst the contradictions in which we all exist.

Volunteers of America: The Journal of a Peace Corps Teacher also documents, more subtly yet pervasively, Dennis’ deep rootedness in place. He wrote with loving detail of his early life in Washington State and its physical beauty, of his connections to his working class family and its historical roots in the American northwest. He wrote of his complex relationship to the small Libyan village in which he would be a Peace Corps volunteer, highlighting his complicated, contradictory role in the traditions of both Euro-American colonialism and American foreign policy, as well as of the Kennedy-era humanist progressivism in which he cut his early activist teeth. Dennis viewed place with an historical, appreciative, but never romantic eye, always fully considering both the promises and paradoxes of any landscape, cultural group, or society in which he found himself.

Dennis would bring that same sense of rootedness in place to his work in our department, and to Oxford, Ohio where he made his home with his long-time partner, Kent Peterson, on a plot of land outside of town, where he enjoyed taking long walks with his beloved dogs. Although a small town in Ohio was not an easy place to settle in as cosmopolitan gay men, Dennis and Kent built a life here that reflected their search for meaningful communities and home-places.

One of these communities, for Dennis, was our department. As mentioned earlier, this was a department in transition when he was hired. Professors Nelda Cambron-McCabe and Richard Quantz were leading a transformation of the department, and had hired young professors Henry Giroux and, later, Peter McLaren to bring critical theoretical perspectives. Giroux and McLaren helped support the hiring of Dennis by, ironically, not publicly communicating their support for him in the search process. Because the critical new directions of the department were a great source of conflict between senior and newer faculty, it is now ironic that Dennis Carlson was hired in our department despite, and not because of, the early admiration that Giroux and McLaren held for him. Although making a great impact on the department's transforming vision, Giroux and McLaren would not stay at Miami to make their careers, but Carlson did—and helped transform a department and many students’ lives, in the process.

Dennis contributed much, in his own quiet, powerful manner, to our departmental transformation from a department of educational administration to one of critical and culture-based approaches to educational leadership in all its forms. He was an idealist and firmly committed to grounding educational work in the highest principles of justice, democracy, and respect for students. His was a strong voice in developing our department's principles (Miami University, 2014) that still guide our work. These principles, while appropriately idealistic, are rooted in the realities of educational practice. Dennis retained an appreciation and solidarity for the work of teachers throughout his career, and in his own classrooms, teaching graduate students (mostly classroom teachers and some budding administrators) about curriculum theory and history, his students appreciated this solidarity. They repaid him with respect and allegiance. Dennis was a beloved teacher and mentor to many graduate students throughout his tenure at Miami.

Dennis also contributed to our department's transformation through his brilliant scholarship. Among his many publications, perhaps the volume Keeping the Promise: Essays on Leadership, Democracy, and Education (Carlson & Gause, 2007) best illustrates Dennis’ unique contributions to our departmental mission. In the introduction, he wrote with co-editor and then-doctoral student, C. P. Gause, that “this volume aims to take a fresh look at educational leadership, and the qualities of democratic educational leadership, in an age when the democratic promise of public education is ‘at risk’ of being abandoned, forgotten, and emptied of meaning” (p. ix). This book, the result of a convening of educational scholars from all around the country, joined the voices of critical theorists, educational leadership, curriculum, and social foundations scholars in a diverse mix that represents well the pluralistic, ambitious, and unique vision of educational leadership we've aspired to create in this department.

As we continue to aspire and persist in recreating that vision in new times, we will greatly miss Dennis Carlson. Although his wise and often transgressive scholarship will continue to be read and admired by readers around the globe, here at Miami University, we will miss him for all the ways in which he contributed to our thinking, growth, and community as a colleague, teacher, and friend.