VCU news

By Sian Wilkerson

In the early 1960s, as many as 50% of Virginia public school teachers were being prepared out of state. This academic year, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education is marking its 60th anniversary, with faculty, staff and students both past and present celebrating its long history of building knowledge and service in Virginia.

In 1964, Richmond Professional Institute, VCU’s predecessor, opened the school to address the need for more teacher preparation programs in the state. It continues to respond to the modern day, said Kathleen Rudasill, Ph.D., interim dean.

She spoke with VCU News about the School of Education’s evolution and its lasting impact on education in Virginia.

With the School of Education celebrating this new milestone, let’s look back at how the school has grown and evolved over the years.

The School of Education has always been responsive to the times in which we were placed. In the 1960s, the focus was on teacher preparation – by 1967, the number of students enrolled in education courses had grown rapidly, reaching nearly 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Fast-forwarding several years, the 1980s were a time of growth, marked by increased student enrollment in teacher preparation programs and the establishment of some of the institution’s longest-serving centers, including the Richmond Rehabilitation and Training Center and the Partnership for People with Disabilities.

A trend that has been consistent through the school’s history is our dedication to the concerns and problems of the local community. Throughout every decade since our founding in 1964, we’ve worked to ensure that local concerns are voiced, heard and addressed, and these relationships are a huge component of what makes the SOE successful.

In the 1990s, the School of Education worked to establish partnerships with the local community, notably with the Metropolitan Education Research Consortium, founded in 1991 as a research practice partnership with surrounding school divisions. Today, MERC is still a thriving organization.

Another landmark occurred in 2011, when we created the RTR Teacher Residency Program to prepare teachers for high-needs and hard-to-staff school settings. It’s the first residency program in the state and a trailblazer in the nation.

Beyond our centers, some big milestones for the School of Education include the development of our five undergraduate programs in educator preparation, which were introduced in 2019, as well as the education doctorate in leadership, which we launched in 2008.

The School of Education has spent decades preparing teachers, principals, counselors and more. How would you describe the school’s impact on education in Virginia?

Because we’re an urban school of education within an urban university, we offer a unique opportunity to students to be prepared to work in urban schools, where there may be racial, ethnic, cultural and language diversity. When it comes to preparing educators, that is critical because there are consistently opportunities in urban settings, and these are also the settings that may be among the hardest to staff.

Furthermore, we have educated around 150 teachers per year over the past five years, and in that span, we have prepared more than 1,620 teachers, counselors, reading specialists and leaders.

In addition, I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize our incredible research footprint. In recent years, the School of Education has consistently been the highest externally funded college or school on the Monroe Park Campus. We have had 64% growth since 2019 in external funding, which demonstrates how we are really a powerhouse when it comes to research funding.

At a recent anniversary celebration with alums, retired faculty and others, what did you hear from former students?

Our keynote speaker, Julia Taylor, now an associate professor of counseling at the University of Virginia, was the first student to get her Ph.D. in counseling and supervision from VCU in 2016. She shared her experiences as a student, highlighting her interactions with faculty and how she developed these very close relationships with her mentors and with other people in her program. She noted that she still reaches out to them to this day if she has a question or if she wants to get some input on something.

Other alums told us how much they valued the connections they made and the relationships they built during their time with the School of Education. They also highlighted the wonderful faculty and the academic environment they experienced while at VCU.