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Dr. Paul Theobald was born in Rochester, Minnesota on March 7, 1956. His father was a rural mail carrier, and mother was a homemaker. He had eight siblings. He has three daughters, Brianna Jo (26), Renee Jean (24), and to save the best for last, Alayna Beth (20). Dr. Theobald is currently the Woods-Beals Endowed Chair in Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College. He is a nationally known scholar and expert on the history of education in the United States. He is an accomplished educational historian whose work frequently crosses disciplinary boundaries and has appeared in such distinguished research journals as Educational Theory, American Journal of Education, Journal of Educational Studies, Journal of Educational Thought, Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, American Historical Review, Educational Foundations, History of Education Quarterly and many others. In terms of curricular thought, he is an advocate of place-based education. According to him, there are two main arguments that support it. One is the “learning” argument, since what we know about how humans come to create understanding makes the immediate locale, one’s immediate surroundings, a perfect contextual lens for looking into the traditional school subjects and coming to understand how they can be used in the world. The second is the “purpose” argument, for an education means much more than preparation for an economic or occupational role. We go to the expense of providing public schools at least partially to prepare citizens for the burden of democracy - and the only way to teach students how to shoulder this burden is to give them a chance to use the traditional school subjects in such a way as to improve life’s circumstances where they live. In his mind, if we want to maximize what students learn and we want them to be as prepared as possible to play economic AND political roles as adults, place-based pedagogy is the direction we must take.

Dr. Theobald completed his BA in History from the St. John’s University in 1978. After receiving his BS in Social Studies education, from Mankato State University in 1981, he took a faculty position as the Social studies and English instructor at Fairfax, Minnesota where he worked from 1981-1986. In 1986, Dr. Theobald joined as the Social studies instructor at Waconia, Minnesota after completing his MS in history from Mankato State University in 1985. After receiving his PhD in educational history from University of Illinois in 1990, he took a faculty position at the Texas A&M University. His time at South Dakota University resulted in his first book (1995), Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918, which has remained the definitive study on the history of rural education in this country for the past twelve years. Prior to joining SUNY College at Buffalo recently, he served as Professor and Dean of the School of Education and Counseling at Wayne State College in Nebraska. He has additionally served as professor and director of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Teacher Education at South Dakota State University. Dr. Theobald is on the editorial board for the Journal of Research in Rural Education and Encounter - The Journal of Education, Meaning and Social Justice. He is also a member of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the American Educational Research Association. Currently, Dr. Theobald is working with Warren Gleckel on an essay - “White Paper” for School of Education Faculty Buffalo State College. Joining the National Network for Educational Renewal? With this brief essay, they are to make a case for attempting to join the National Network for Educational Renewal (NNER), an entity created by John Goodlad and his associates in the late 1980s. Dr. Theobald designed The Teacher Study Group project in year 2006-2007 to serve as a useful and viable professional development effort for rural teachers. Dr. Theobald currently facilitates two teacher study groups, one in Alexander, NY, the other in Randolph, NY. Each is a group of eight educators who read articles and books and discuss the implications of what they read on their day-to-day work lives. During the 2005-2006 school year with guidance from the Dean of Buffalo State’s School of Education, Dr. Theobald has orchestrated the non-tenured faculty mentorship project which is intended to clarify matters related to promotion and tenure on the Buffalo State campus and have orchestrated meetings for two years now.

Research Interest
Dr. Theobald’s research interests include the relationship of community to culture, character, education, and democracy and teacher education as a contribution to democracy. His research is an attempt to tie three realms of the human condition, politics, economics, and education, a little more tightly together at a conscious level.

Major Works of Dr. Paul Theobald
•Theobald, Paul. “A Case for Inserting Community into Public School Curriculum,” American Journal of Education, 112(3), (May 2006): 315-334

•Theobald, Paul. Recasting America’s Political, Economic, and Educational Theory, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, manuscript in preparation.

•Theobald, Paul. Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1997.

•Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918. Southern llinois University Press, Carbondale, 1995.

•Rodriguez, Alicia, Theobald, Paul, et al. Foundations of Educational Policy in the United States. Fourth edition. Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press, 1989.

Teaching the Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community, is an intellectual history that weaves in philosophical themes in an attempt to build a new vision for educational ends.

Dr. Paul Theobald’s work in rural schooling and the history of rural communities has consistently been thoughtful and meticulous in its approach. His book, Teaching The Commons: Place, Pride, and the Renewal of Community continues in this tradition with a firmly intellectual and critical examination of the historical roots of present social, cultural, and educational directions and problems. Furthermore, the book presents a strong case for a curriculum of place as the means for changing social and cultural directions and solving many social problems. He begins with the argument that much of what is wrong with contemporary culture can be traced to changes that brought about a lack of intradependence, and social beliefs that place individual triumph over shared community values, including the structure of modern schooling. `Interdependence speaks of dependence within a place, dependence on the good will and wisdom of people with whom the land is shared’ (p. 15). Dr. Theobald takes the reader on a wonderfully journey through these changes, beginning with the Greeks and their classical liberal views, and ending with contemporary culture. He supports his descriptions and arguments coherently and thoroughly with powerful historical examples, with particular attention being paid to the dynamics of European history and events in US history that are commonly avoided, such as the Shay Rebellion, the crop-lien systems in use after the Civil War, the Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. One particularly interesting aspect of the book is Dr. Theobald’s assertion that the introduction of clocks into European culture marked a turning point in human cultural development. That is, he suggests that with the invention of the timepiece, human beings began to perceive time as linear rather than cyclic. Linear time and the measurement of time in terms of well-defined units helped destabilize agrarian, community-oriented value systems and marked the end of unprecedented agricultural production and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. As the introduction of money and monetary economies became linked with linear time, there was a corresponding shift toward individual accumulation of wealth. The concept of `spending time’ became central to how the person made the decisions regarding personal actions, including decisions about whether or not to contribute to the larger community or to work toward personal economic desires. Those sorts of choices and decisions were not made during the previous periods when time was viewed as cyclic and individual contribution to the larger community was critical to the survival and success of the community. Dr. Theobald continues the historic journey, moving from a clear picture of post-Renaissance Europe through the westward movement across North America and into contemporary culture. The pictures permanently drawn for the reader are ones that provide substantive evidence of how the decline and deterioration of shared obligation are largely due to a shift toward Smithian economics and Lockean individualism. In a community, that is truly a community, social identity is tied to one’s contribution to the shared place, that is, one’s work. Embracing Adam Smith and a national economy (and our subsequent embrace of an international economy) has removed the social identity that came with the contribution one made to the health and well-being of the community. (p. 73). Dr. Theobald argues that for contemporary culture, any conventional wisdom that attributes to an individually oriented worldview or narcissistic civilization is infact predictive of moral decay. Lives without commitment to much of anything, particularly when strengthened by economic, political, and educational theory premised on individualism, become increasingly egocentric, and the culture, therefore, becomes increasingly degenerate. One should logically expect prisons to become a predictable part of the landscape of such a society, and regrettably, such is our current state of a. airs. (p. 43). The moral underpinnings of education, therefore, should be restated to bring about a refocusing of individual success measured by wealth and acquisition towards a focus on community success, shared obligation, and community accomplishment. Dr. Theobald suggests that a starting place for this change is logically within the contexts of rural schools that embrace a curriculum of place consciousness and shared obligation. He argues that the current purpose of schooling as preparation for careers and jobs is counter to a larger democratic, moral ideal, and that continued pressure in this direction will logically target the culture for continued deterioration. Furthermore, he argues that the commonly accepted norm of a curriculum as information or a set of facts is inherently erroneous and perhaps dangerous, and beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school, curriculum should be founded upon multidisciplinary study and deliberation or social, historical, and political discourse embedded in the school and the students’ recognition of the community’s unique place. Indeed, he suggests that such a curriculum would be essential if we are ever to return to a society based on civic virtue, shared values, and common community. For many, the standards movement may seem to make a great deal of sense if children are to be able to survive in what many describe as an increasingly competitive economic world. For others, the second temporary educational approaches often effectively disguise a deeply hidden prejudice that puts continued economic superiority, maintenance of social, and class divisions over any moral considerations. It is precisely these economic, amoral arguments that Dr. Theobald rejects; he suggests that restoration of community and a democracy of place will best be accomplished by parents, teachers, and school communities working together: `reconstituting community on an educational foundation may well be our best available solution to the violent culture that follows an excessive emphasis on individualism’(p. 146). Dr. Theobald suggests that the new forms of socially and morally engaging activities and strategies are currently happening in many classrooms, although not to any great extent. Taking the direction towards avoiding the push towards scores on standardized tests, Dr. Theobald admits, will be neither easy nor quick. It will require constant community building and leaders who are willing to risk against a tide of national rhetoric demanding immediate higher test scores and a return to highly disciplined, authoritarian classrooms. He presents no easy methods for beginning the process, nor does he prescribe any specific steps or remedies. He does, however, reminds us that we know a great deal about changing schools, and he encourages us to use this knowledge to work toward this greater common good: Working together toward this end gives us the right to expect more than the prisons, the violence, the abuse, and the poverty - and the simultaneous decadent affluence at the other end of the spectrum- that have come to define American society. (p. 159). For those who study and work in rural schools and communities, this book presents a weapon of a difficult moral challenge and the exhilaration that comes with understanding.