Oral History, Educating Harlem Project, Teachers College, Columbia University
Narrator: Hope Jensen Leichter, Elbenwood Professor of Education, Teachers College (“R”)
Interviewer: Nick Juravich, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Columbia University (“I”)
Date: October 23, 2014
Location: Prof. Leichter’s Office at Teachers College
I: And we are recording—
R: And if I need to stop for water or anything, we can stop, right?
I: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So—
R: OK.
I: Uh, yeah, so to open this recording, this is Nick Juravich, uh-, recording for the Educating Harlem Project on October 23, 2014. I have the privilege of sitting with Professor Hope Leichter of Teachers College, uh-, who has been uh-, involved in many different aspects of uh-, paraprofessional training, family education, community education over her career. And thank you so much for sitting down with us.
R: Well, thank you for coming to me. I-, it’s an honor.
I: And so to start with, we should say first off that this recording is being made in accordance with uh-, what we consider to be oral history best practices, so before anything said on this cassette is made public, and it’s not a cassette—. I should—. This digital thing. Um-, you will have a chance to review the transcript, uh-, to strike as much of it or all of it from the record if you’d like. And also to make any edits to anything you’ve said. And then once that process happens, this will be archived for the Educating Harlem Project, and also uh-, I’ll use it as part of my dissertation.
R: That’s fine with me.
I: Wonderful. Another thing with respect to the interview today, if at any point you’d like to stop the tape, uh-, we certainly can. So for (___?), you don’t need to give a reason, for any reason at all, if you say you’d like to go off the record, stop the tape, take a break, anything like that, you stop it. And that’s that. And also if—
R: I—
I: —you’d like the interview to be over, too.
R: Well, we can—. Right. Right.
I: Mmm-hmm.
R: Uh-
I: And we can always come back to it later as well.
R: And can you just tell me the Educating Harlem Project—. Who-, who are the people?
I: Ah. So uh-, Ernest Morrell and Ansley Erickson are the co-directors uh-. Professor Morrell with the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, and Professor Erickson with uh-, the History and Education program. And now I guess the new Center for History of Education as well.
R: All right. Uh-. Well, I was with Professor Morrell earlier today [laughing while talking: at a search committee.]
I: Ah. Fantastic.
R: You know. (clears throat)
I: So I should also say that the topics that I was hoping to cover in the course of today’s interview—and we’ll get as far as we can—I would love to hear from you about uh-, the, um-, the programs you worked with that connected to particularly paraprofessionalism, but also to hear about your own story more broadly. How you came to do this work. How it fits into your larger uh-, work and the stuff, um-, that you’ve done both here at TC and, and more broadly. Um-. There’s a couple of uh-, institutions and organizations and programs I’m interested in specifically, one of which is the Women’s Talent Corps. Another of which is the Parent Teacher Teams Programs here at Teachers College. Uh-. And I’d also-, I’d love to hear you say more about the sort of-, the idea of both paraprofessionals but also community-based educators more broadly. Think about what was achieved, what proved challenging, and also as we talked about last time, what this might all offer us today.
R: Mm—
I: So those are-, those are the big themes, the big, the big questions. But um-, sometimes the best way to start this is to ask: Where should we begin? (heh, heh)
R: Well, um-, let me see. Um-. Chronologically, I guess, the first thing. I mean, I can tell you my, my background, where I came from educationally, and, and how I ended up doing family things here. But maybe that’s a longer story than you need for, for all of this.
I: No. I’d love to start there.
R: —Uh—. (clears throat)
I: That’d be great.
R: Well, uh-. I got my—and then perhaps we said this last time, but we’ll pretend I didn’t. OK? (heh, heh)
I: Quite all right. (heh, heh)
R: Uh-. (clears throat) I received my doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, which was sociology, anthropology, clinical and social psychology at the time. And I did not imagine that I would have a faculty position anywhere because at the time I was at Harvard, there were basically no full-time women faculty. So I thought I would be a researcher in various places. And I didn’t have the feminist consciousness to say I should be a professor. I just thought: Well, I’m lucky to be here. I’m lucky to have this opportunity. And long story, personal story, is I came to New York. My husband was going to law school here. So I ended up in New York and worked for a while with the Russell Sage Foundation. I had a grant from the Russell Safe Foundation later. I worked earlier than that on a study at Cornell Medical School on Chinese who were exiled in the United States. I did my dissertation using data from this project.
After the Cornell Project, I worked on research at the Jewish Family Service with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation. The Foundation’s mandate at that time included bringing social science theories and methods to bear on the “practicing professions.” The history of the Russell Sage Foundation is an interesting reflection of the times. In the book I did, Kinship and Casework with William E. Mitchell, there is a Foreword by Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., one of the key members of the Foundation staff, that I think is relevant to the history of the time and why social scientists, who were working in this country at least, were working in ways where the connection with practice was considered one of the things that we ought to be doing. We shouldn’t just be theorizing about society and what’s going on. We ought to bring the things we do known from our profession to bear on the practicing professionals. These ideas made it seem legitimate for me to go from Cornell Medical School to work in a social work agency where we ended up doing a study of kinship and how social workers intervened in relationships with extended family networks. The casework agency was doing family therapy. Bill Mitchell and I had been very junior researchers on the Cornell Project. When that project ended, we moved to the project at the Jewish Family Service with support of the Russell Sage Foundation. We wanted to bring social science concepts to bear on the then understanding of families.
The agency wanted us to prove that family therapy in their particular version was the way to go. I think the term “evidence-based” was not the vocabulary at the time, but the agency wanted social science proof that family therapy was more valuable than individual therapy. We said: Oh, no, no, no. We’re social scientists and we’re trying to help you see things you wouldn’t otherwise see. And so what did we do?
Well, one of the things anthropologists do is look at family structures and kinship systems around the world. And there is such a thing as the extended family. The Jewish Family Service was an agency that was working on family relationships, bringing family groups together but mainly nuclear families or whatever pieces were intact. For example, husband, wife, and children. And doing therapy with them. But not necessarily thinking about kinship. And so a long series of negotiations, which I won’t go into at length—this is really background for the work on the College of Human Services and Paraprofessionals. Except that it’s background for why I felt it was OK to be working in a school of education on a practical program in Harlem that involved families. So just to finish up on the piece of the saga on the Kinship and Casework project (clears throat) which you might find interesting—
I: Hm-. Yeah.
R: We did some research and we went trudging around—. Your recorder is teeny (pointing to recorder) We went—
I: This thing?
R: We went trudging through the Bronx and to various homes of clients of the agency with big heavy tape recorders.
I: (heh, heh)
R: Heavy, heavy [laughing while talking: tape recorders and they—] I don’t know what the fidelity was but they didn’t screen out a lot of the background noises so there was an awful lot of background noise. But in any case, that’s [laughing while talking: it was an earlier time.]
I: Sure.
R: Families had the television on and we had traffic noises outside and the neighbors screaming and all that kind of thing. But we were in people’s homes and studying the families. And in the course of this, we’re trying to find out why they were going to the social work agency and what family therapy meant to them. In this preliminary pilot study, talking with people not as social workers but as researchers, we kept observing relatives come in and out. There was one cast I can remember where there was an extended family. They happened to be a Jewish family. Neither my colleague Bill Mitchell nor I were Jewish, although my late husband was. But he was not religious. That’s another story.
But in any case, we didn’t know the Jewish religion or beliefs or anything. But this, this mother-in-law or mother, mother-in-law, depending whether it was the husband or the wife’s point of view, was sharing the refrigerator. She lived next door or somewhere nearby. And they were sharing the refrigerator. And there was some degree of controversy over this because how can you be sure that everyone has the same degree of care with respect to what makes it kosher or not.
I: Mmm.
R: But it seemed to be a viable relationship in some ways. But people were dropping in all the time. Friends, neighbors, relatives. That’s just one example to try to make the point vivid. We kept thinking about this. Partly it was the distractions on the tape and then we were thinking things like: Maybe we should have had a way to screen out the sound or gone into a little room within the apartment to talk to one person. Then we realized we’re anthropologists. We’re seeing things that are interesting.
So fast forward. We ended up doing some interviews and surveys looking at the relationships with the extended family. And how social workers intervened in relationships with the extended family. We also got data from the social workers, for example, their goals for therapy. We didn’t know what the outcomes were, but we found that the social workers were much less kin-oriented than the clients. And the social workers often saw their goals as modifying relationships with the extended family. We have a whole section in the book that’s kind of neat on that point, showing that ways of talking about kin relationships were different. The social workers would use psychological phrasing and the clients would sometimes use rather (laughing) vernacular accusations, let’s say.
The general gist was that the clients often had conflicts and arguments and differences, but they didn’t necessarily want to cut off the ties with the extended family. And the social workers believed that a part of psychological therapy was to cut your ties with the extended family to “individuate” and “mature.” As anthropologists trained in looking at kinship systems around the world, this was intriguing. So we got data. We did interviews and questionnaires and so forth. It’s not a large sample or conclusive, but the ideas were, I think, very interesting. It was also a kind of neat example of really bringing the social sciences to the practicing professions because, frankly, I don’t think they wanted to hear what we had to say. I really don’t. We argued in an appendix to the book that while research doesn’t get applied to practice by being put in a book or put in a folder or put in a research file, you have to continue talking with people about it. Indeed, I think that’s what you do have to do.
Subsequently, there was a lot of talk in the social work field, and not necessarily referencing what we had done, but we did happen to do it first. Saying, oh, well, maybe the extended family is a resource and we should not be cutting people off from the extended family. That is one piece of the background I brought from very, very abstract Parsonian sociological theory at Harvard and social relations, bringing together these different fields and disciplines. It was a very exciting time.
Harvard was great because we thought we were at the pinnacle of the world, having all these intellectual breakthroughs. But I also didn’t know. You’d walk out in the Harvard Yard and say: I don’t know which is true. Are the trees true or is Parsons true? Then I got into this case where we were in fact trying to work with people. Then that project ended.
In the meantime I’d finished my dissertation while doing both the dissertation and the research project. And I had a son. But that’s all another story.
I: (heh, heh)
R: Then I had a chance to teach a course at Columbia School of Social Work because they were very impressed with the work we were doing for the project. Then I was asked to come to Teachers College. And because of my family background—my mother had been a teacher and my stepfather also taught for a while. My mother had actually gone to Teachers College for a while and studied in the heyday of the Deweyan emphasis here. I had a feeling that in education, you can make use of your social science background to make a difference in the world. You can do it with—how should I put it? More optimism if you do it through a school of education than if you do it in a school of social work.
Social work somehow seemed to me at the time more remedial. In education, you can start working with people who are going to be working with young kids. That’s background on some of the ideas that I brought with me when I first came to Teachers College. Do you have any questions on any of that? Or—