Faculty News

Alan Tom Retires

July 1, 2005

Alan Tom will retire on July 1 after a 39-career as a university faculty member.  During his 13-year tenure as a professor of education at Carolina, he provided leadership in program development and redesign, served as director of teacher education, taught in the Elementary Teacher Education Program and the Culture, Community, and Change strand of the Ph.D. Program, worked with teachers in the field, consulted with schools and universities, wrote extensively and lectured across the United States and beyond.

Two books authored by Tom have made a significant impact on the profession.  In Teaching as a Moral Craft (Longman, 1984), he wrote about the nature of teaching, offering a critique of the applied science view of teaching and proposing instead a moral and social view.  Even today, this book is quoted to support an alternative to the highly technical view of teaching so common in schooling. 
In Redesigning Teacher Education (SUNY Press, 1997), he presented principles for improving the content and structure of teacher education.  This book received the 1999 Outstanding Writing Award from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the 2000 Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association.

“Alan’s nationally recognized publications have provided leadership to the field and added recognition to the School of Education,” said John Brantley, School of Education professor emeritus and long-time colleague.  “He is an exemplar of the teaching craft, and a scholar without reluctance to remind us of moral values in education.”

Alan Tom began his career as a high school history teacher in Wisconsin and Illinois.

“After a few years in the classroom, I thought I could change teacher education,” Tom said.  He began graduate study at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction in 1966.

Before coming to Carolina, he was a faculty member, center director and later department chair at Washington University in St. Louis.  Subsequently he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Arizona where he served as coordinator of teaching and teacher education.

Reflecting on his career, Tom attests to the importance of taking advantage of the possibilities that are present.  Although he had not planned to focus on elementary education at UNC, when he arrived at the School of Education he found that the elementary faculty were planning on rethinking their curriculum.  Seeing an opportunity, Tom became a leader in an extensive program redesign that resulted in a new curriculum, the use of cohorts, more field-based experience for students and a smaller, more selective program.

What changes in education would Alan Tom like to see in the future?  “Mostly I would encourage less of things rather than more – less testing, less paperwork, less criticism of the profession in the press,” he said.  “For teacher education, I would emphasize working in concert with schools and using field-based approaches.”