Before her retirement from the college last semester, Diane Anderson was a beloved educational studies professor for over 35 years and associate dean for academic success from 2009-2017 at Swarthmore. Last semester, Zoe Baochen Tang ’27, her long-time student, sat down with Anderson to talk about her roots that led her to her teaching experience and pedagogy, the foundation of the Learning for Life program, and what she hopes to continue to accomplish after Swarthmore. Listen to the interview below.
Zoe Tang: One of the questions I was most curious about was about crafting. What really got you into crafting? And also because your most recent work is about how crafting, like knitting, helps pre-service teachers [students working toward teacher certification] develop empathy, I wonder what do you feel when you’re crafting, and could you talk a little bit about your crafting journey?
Diane Anderson: I come from a family where we always made a lot of presents for ourselves and one another, and so that was just part of what we did. I’m the first one in my family to graduate from college, and I lived in a white working class community, where a lot of people worked with their hands, to build or to repair things. It was always part of the world that I lived in, and this shapes a lot of my thinking about many things here at the college. They were very smart people, and so I don’t think I ever fully accepted the binary of intellectual academic learning as one side, and vocational, hand-oriented learning — maintenance, building, etc. — on the other side.
In terms of our minds, I’ve never made the distinction between academic and non-academic learning. In the last few years, I have lived into that more fully and been able to put more words to it, and it probably has a lot to do with how and why I got to know people on campus when I first started working here, from EVS [Environmental Services] and eventually the dining hall people. They felt like the people I grew up with in many ways.
Another part of it is that I wasn’t good at knitting like my grandmother and my mother were. And when I had a sabbatical at the age of 50, there was a new knitting store in town. So I went down there and learned how to knit. It was a struggle. It took my brain a while to get it, and there were tears involved. But once I got it, it was exciting. Partly it was exciting because it makes watching television and taking plane rides, train rides, and car rides much better, because I have something to do.
ZT: That makes a lot of sense, and I feel like it naturally leads into my questions about Learning for Life, which are: How do you see knitting and the work that the staff do as being related? What inspired the Learning for Life program?
DA: When we first started Learning for Life back in around 1998, there were a lot of partnerships between the staff and students, where they taught each other things. And at that time, a lot of the staff wanted to learn how to work on computers, or they wanted to make up for something that they had not had a good experience with in high school, like algebra.
I remember there was this one staff member who just spent a couple of years learning algebra, and another one who was learning about world religions from a student here on campus. And the staff were teaching students things that were not part of the curriculum here — quilting, and believe it or not, photography. Sharon Pierce [an EVS worker] is an excellent photographer, and she has often partnered up with students before she retired from Learning for Life, so that they could either learn some new techniques together if they were both photographers, or where somebody could learn from her. And in the summertime, when we did Summer of Learning (SoL) projects, Sharon would often lead students and staff at the college. They would take walks around campus and with their cameras, and Sharon would lead them in thinking about how to take good pictures.
And there’s one other thing. My husband is a cellist, who obviously works with his mind and his hands. He used to play with the opera company in Philadelphia, and he apprenticed to a Dutch violin maker to become a violin maker so that he could have a day job and an income. So living closely with someone, learning through apprenticeship and working with their hands, made it abundantly clear to me that this is not just about your hands. It’s also about your mind, and that apprenticeship has tradition. And as I started doing more reading about Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning theory, I was beginning to understand about learning as not just transmission of information and skills, but also about apprenticeship — being in communities of practice, learning from people that know a little bit more than you, and that intersected with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, so it all came together for me in some interesting ways. I’m not good at teaching without bringing the things I’m thinking about into my teaching, which is why teaching at a place like Swarthmore is fabulous.
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ZT: I was also curious about the mentors who led you on your trajectory, and also like what you would call yourself? Because it sounded like you started out identifying with this identity as being a teacher, and then maybe reading specialist, and then finally a doctorate. I’m just wondering how you would like to call yourself, and how would you like other people to see you?
DA: Teacher, absolutely teacher. And part of it is, you know, we all have those people along the way that show us a better way to do things. I’ve always been a little bit of the fly on the wall in classrooms, even from kindergarten on. That’s why I remember so much of it. I was always analyzing and seeing what people did that I didn’t think was working very well. I had a couple of teachers: Mr. Drummond in sixth grade; Betty Beadle, who was my first grade teacher and elementary school principal; and then I had a couple of really good teachers in high school, including Mrs. Henry, who was my guidance counselor. These were all people who taught and did their work by getting out of the boundaries of what they were supposed to be doing.
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If I think about Mr. Drummond, he was amazing. He was teaching in the 1960s and had a Volkswagen Beetle, and he took the whole class outside to his car, and taught us about combustible engines. He didn’t just teach the boys. He taught all of us about the engines. You know, he was the kind of person that didn’t want us to just read and write and do arithmetic. He wanted us to think — science and social studies are all about exploring questions and thinking, and he wouldn’t simply give us the answers, but laid a groundwork for us to figure things out. I remember when I figured out in his class how condensation formed on the outside of the glass of ice water on a hot June day, because of the things he had taught the previous week about molecules and heat and cold. I’ll never forget that moment of feeling my head explode because I had an insight, and it was my insight. It wasn’t a teacher telling me that “that was the answer.” He had set it up so that we could have insights, and that was just brilliant.
And there’s the guidance counselor I had in high school. She knew all of our family stories, and she had 300 students to take care of. And I remember there was a kid in my community that came from a really problematic family, and he didn’t have a place to live. She took him into her family, and he spent a year or two living with her family. That was what matters.
But you’d have people like that who could see you, and there are others that were so terrible whom you get in trouble with for the dumbest thing … So there were times when I wasn’t nurtured for the things that I was really serious about and interested in, and I remember when I got to grad school at Penn and realized, “Oh, all these things that I was interested in are those that professors told me not to do, like grammar and etymology and that kind of things that fall under the category of socio-linguistics.” It’s very cool to discover that, but also to know ‘those people weren’t paying attention,’ and that’s why. You know there are times when students will come and say, ‘you gave us this assignment, but I’d sort of like to do this other one instead.’ If it’s serious inquiry and thinking, and it has any relationship to what we’re doing, I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ because that might be the thing that lays the foundation for the rest of their life, or it might be just the thing that they click off the inquiry box, and they could learn something that way, and that’s great too.
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ZT: It’s like that for me as well. And so I wonder, what does good pedagogy look like?
DA: It’s really interesting that you’re asking this question because I’ve been thinking about a lot of this over the last year or so, as I’m contemplating retirement … I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think I can best articulate it into some questions that I don’t fully have the answers to — they are questions for me. And one comes back to an aspect of apprenticeship learning that I think of as just sharing, and so I’m really wondering how much of our teaching-learning is really about sharing — sharing what we know, sharing what we don’t know, sharing our questions, sharing our lives? Because if we know a little bit more about each other’s lives, then we might be better at sharing and knowing what the questions are?
And I’m thinking more about learning as awe. How much can we create situations where, you know, like that one that I had in sixth grade, where I’m putting the stuff together, and my mind is working, and I’m coming up with the answer instead of somebody feeding it to me, and the physical and emotional experience of figuring something out … It’s just an awesome moment.
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[And there’s] another piece, which is to challenge that binary of who’s teaching and who’s learning, and that always leads me back to Learning for Life, because I really believe that if we’re living and able to be our true selves in the spaces that we’re in, then, heck, we’re all teachers and learners some of the time, and to recognize that a little bit more explicitly would do our educational profession some honor.
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ZT: So how do you envision your life to look like after Swarthmore — I know you’re going to be living in Maine — and what is one thing you have to leave behind that you feel bittersweet about, and what is one thing that you sort of anticipate moving forward?
DA: Oh, that’s a really good question. So first of all, I’m not going right away to Maine, because it’s going to take me a year to clean out my house. And we might keep an apartment down here for a little while, because my husband has his chamber music groups. In some ways, okay, I’m … what I will cry about — I’ll try not to do it now — is how much I’m gonna miss the students. I just really value other human beings. I really do, and I love young people. I look at some of the students that I have this semester, and I know that some of you I can stay in touch with, and you’ll stay in touch with me. But some of the ones that I’ve just met, that I’m not going to be there for their whole journey through Swarthmore. I’ll miss that.
I’m also going to miss spaces. This sounds crazy, but look at this office. I know it’s a big hot mess, but I have loved the light in this wonderful office. I have loved this campus. I know the campus well. Spent a lot of time in the woods. Always have, with and without the dogs, but of course, the love that I have for the natural part of this campus is part of why I’m going to Maine, because I love being in the dirt, being in the woods.
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ZT: At the very end, would you consider Swarthmore to be your home after all of these years, and why or why not?
DA: Oh yeah. Like a family, it doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes dysfunctional. As imperfect as it might be, I think it’s a place that’s always trying to do better. And I think that’s true with pretty much everybody who works here. We might not always agree with one another about what better means, or how things should happen, but I honestly think it still mostly has a foundation of Quakerism that sees the God or the Good in everyone, and when we really live into that that is when we do best.
I never expected to be here, Zoe. And I never expected to be here this long. When I applied for the tenure-line job, I had plan B, C, D, E, F, G … and so many other possible things, and I wasn’t going to be all cranky if I didn’t get the job. But, working in this department, working at this college, being in the dean’s office, where I could do some of my best problem solving with other people, was such a joy. Just a deep joy — to work with other people, to solve problems, so that if you had a pesky problem and you got the right people in the room, my goal was always that you solved a problem, so that everybody could leave the room with their dignity intact. That has always been my guiding light, not so that somebody could be the winner and somebody could be the loser, but so that we get to a good solution. I can’t tell you that it always worked out that way, but that was always the goal, and that’s really important to me.
ZT: I really liked how you described your story coming here, because it also kind of reminds me of my own experience. Reflecting on my own life, I feel like you never can really predict what’s going to happen to you. And I do feel like you kind of ‘grow’ into an identity. You don’t start off necessarily wanting to be that; it just sort of happens, and you gradually, gradually go into it.
DA: It’s like what Laban Wenger talked about, that you are absorbed into an identity, into becoming something. It happens through space, people, communities of practice, language, and access … And honestly, access has been a really big part of why I want to get the Learning for Life program institutionalized here. One of the things I’ve always noticed about Swarthmore is that it’s a place for social justice, and we often go elsewhere, because we want to bring social justice to other places, but we don’t always do the work at home on this campus. And, it’s often the very people who are in those “elsewheres,” who work here, that make this place what it is.
