Collecting area: Education

At the height of the environmental movement, Springfield, Mass., public school teachers Lorraine Ide and Clifford A. Phaneuf set a goal of helping young students to understand and appreciate their role in nature. In collaboration with the city’s parks department and schools, Ide and Phaneuf opened the Environmental Center for Our Schools (ECOS) in 1970. Intended for elementary and middle school students in the city, ECOS enables students and teachers to expand their knowledge of the natural world by exploring the diverse habitats of Forest Park. The program was designed for immersive, hands-on discovery: students participate in outdoor activities, study nature, and learn the survival needs of all living things.

The ECOS records consist of materials from the organization’s planning and early years, including Title III information, curricula, evaluations, copies of tests, teaching guides, and other educational materials, publications, reports, meeting agendas, and conference materials.

Cheryl Evans singing at Medford High School, ca. 1962

A lifelong activist, performer, and educator, Cheryl Lorraine Evans was born in 1946 in west Medford, MA, the eldest of five. As a high school student, Evans attended the march on Washington in 1963, and was then the first in her family to attend college, in 1964 joining the largest class at UMass Amherst to date. She graduated four years later as a pivotal organizer of African American students across campus, the Five Colleges, and in the region – during the period when Black student groups, the Black Cultural Center, and the Black Studies department all had their origins at UMass. Evans was the first elected president of an African American student organization at UMass, and remains an organizer to this day, particularly as a key connector for Black alumni and through her UMass Black Pioneers Project.

Evans went on to work at UMass as an assistant area coordinator of Orchard Hill, an area housing the majority of the students of color and CCEBS students on campus at the time, and then for the Urban University Program at Rutgers University. She worked for over a decade in early childhood education, mostly in New Jersey and New York City, then while working for the State of Massachusetts received her MA in Communication from Emerson College, partially to help her public radio show, “Black Family Experience.” Evans was the first African American woman to run for City Council in Medford, and was appointed to the Massachusetts Area Planning Council by Governor Dukakis. She taught for five years at Northshore Community College, received her PhD from Old Dominion University in 1997, and ended her career at Bloomfield College, where she was a professor for 18 years until her retirement in 2016. A prolific singer as a child and young adult, Evans was, and continues to be, a performance artist, with several theater pieces focused on Black history, all in addition to her outreach, organizing, and workshops, many focused on increasing the number of Black graduate and doctoral students.

The Cheryl Evans Papers document over 60 years of the life of the educator and activist, including childhood report cards and essays, clippings from the civil rights movement she followed and joined as a high school student, undergraduate records and ephemera, documentation of Black UMass alumni events, and records from her careers in public advocacy, education, and the theater. Evan’s time at UMass is especially well documented, including schoolwork, numerous photographs of student life on campus, social and political organization records, including contact lists of and correspondence with Black students, and the original protest demands from the 1970 Mills House protest and march to Whitmore.

The University’s first Dean of Students, William F. Field held the post from 1961 until his retirement in 1988. The 27 years Field was Dean of Students was a critical time of growth and unrest, as the University’s student population more than tripled in size and the nation-wide movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War were reflected through student activism and protest on the University’s campus. Responsible for ending student curfews and overseeing all dorms becoming co-ed, Field also worked with minority students and faculty to support the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

The William F. Field Papers document Field’s career as an administrator at the University of Massachusetts and specifically his role as Dean of Students from 1961-1988. The correspondence, memoranda, reports, notes, and other official printed and manuscript documents are a rich resource for one of the most important and volatile eras in the University’s history. Of particular interest are extensive files on student protests and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the growing diversity of the campus student population, flourishing of the Black Arts Movement on campus and the founding of the W.E.B. Du Bois Afro-American Studies Department.

Alice Blake Hawes Garside, who became a prominent educator in Boston known for working with students with reading and learning challenges, was born in 1909 in New Bedford, Mass., a descendant of a whaling family with deep roots there. She graduated from Vassar College in 1930, the year she married Kenneth Garside, with whom she had three daughters before they divorced in 1956. Beginning in the early 1950s, Alice Garside worked as a reading tutor at the Cambridge School in Weston and reading supervisor in the language clinic at Mass General, where she was trained in the Orton-Gillingham method under Dr. Edwin Cole, a pioneer in the field of learning disabilities. Having also earned a master’s degree from Boston University, she trained teachers at the Carroll School from its founding in 1967, joining the school’s staff in 1976 and staying until her retirement in 1990. She was honored as the first recipient of the Alice H. Garside Award from the Massachusetts Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in 1985 and the IDA’s highest honor, the Samuel T. Orton Award, in 1987. In her retirement, she continued to consult on reading and made regular trips to the Bermuda Reading Clinic. Alice Garside passed away in 2007 at age 98.

The Alice H. Garside Papers cover Garside’s professional life as a teacher as well as her personal life. There is documentation of her extensive travels, including the six-month round-the-world trip she took not long after her divorce, as well as correspondence, photographs and photo albums, journals, ephemera, and memorabilia. The collection also includes some family history and genealogical material.

A specialist in higher education and comparative politics in the developing world, Fred Hayward earned a doctorate in Politics at Princeton in 1968 for his research on political organizations in West Africa. Following a 24 year career at the University of Wisconsin (1967-1991), where he became Dean of International Studies and Programs, Hayward has worked as a Senior Associate to the American Council on Education, a consultant to the World Bank, and since 2009, as a Senior Higher Education Consultant with UMass Amherst. Having worked in fifteen countries with ministries, universities, and NGOs, his scholarship runs the gamut from African politics to higher education in Afghanistan.

The papers document some of Fred Hayward’s activities, centered in Africa and Afghanistan. The bulk of the collection stems from his work in Sierra Leone during the 1960s through 1980s, in Ethiopia (2003), and it includes noteworthy material on a World Bank-funded project to support strategic planning for six Afghan Universities as well as a feasibility study on private section involvement in Afghan higher education.

Between 1957 and 1968, the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee brought academically gifted African American high school students from the south to live and study in the north. Working initially through its New York office, the AFSC announced its desire to bring “to promising young people, thwarted by the doctrine of the separation of the races, the fullest development of their gifts” while providing northern whites with “an experience which will increase our understanding and deepen our involvement with the human community.”

A dense and nearly comprehensive record of participation in the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee, the Holmes collection documents a Quaker response to the civil rights crisis of the late 1950s and 1960s. Holmes carefully filed nearly every relevant piece of paper associated with his participation, from the fliers that introduced him to the project to listings of eligible students, his lengthy letter of inquiry and application, and his numerous exchanges with his support committee, the local high school, and the American Friends Service Committee. Perhaps more important, he kept both sides of an extensive and often lengthy correspondence with the Craig family, describing Deborah’s adjustment and progress in Amherst and the response of the local community. The collection also includes Holmes’ report of the Friends Conference on Race Relations and some correspondence between Holmes and Craig during her time in college, when Holmes attempted to provide counsel and financial support to help Craig continue her education.

The Howland family of East Greenwich, R.I., figured prominently in New England Quakerism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and contributed to the state’s public affairs. Brothers Daniel (1754-1834), an approved minister, and Thomas Howland (1764-1845), an educator, were active members of the Society during the tumultuous years between the 1780s and 1840s, caught up in the moral demands for a response to slavery and other social issues and in the divisions wrought by evangelical influences.

Centered largely on the lives of Thomas Howland, his brother Daniel, and Daniel’s son Daniel, the Howland collection is an important record of Quaker life in Rhode Island during trying times. As meeting elders, the Howlands monitored and contributed to the era’s major controversies, and the collection is particularly rich in discussions of the impact of slavery and the passionate struggle between Friends influenced by the evangelically-inclined Joseph John Gurney and the orthodox John Wilbur. Thomas’ complex response to his commitment to the antislavery cause and his fear of disrupting meeting unity is particularly revealing. Also of note is a series of responses from monthly meetings to queries on compliance with Quaker doctrine, obtained during the decade after the American Revolution.

A 1967 graduate of Springfield College, Judith Collings Hudson earned doctoral degree in 2001 through the UMass Amherst School of Education for her dissertation, Freedom teachers: Northern White women teaching in southern Black communities, 1860s and 1960s. The project was an ambitious comparative study of the experiences of White teachers, mostly northern women, living and teaching in southern Black communities during the Reconstruction era south and those who taught during Mississippi Freedom Summer.

The Hudson Papers focus closely on the second half of her dissertation, relating to the Freedom Schools and educational initiatives associated with the Mississippi Freedom Summer and the civil rights movement. In addition to her dissertation, research notes, some correspondence, and background materials, the collection includes an important array of audio interviews with teachers and participants in the Freedom Summer, most of which have been transcribed.

Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the New Zealand expatriate Rewi Alley threw his considerable talents behind the war effort. Building upon knowledge acquired over a decade of living in China, Alley helped organize the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Movement (CIC). The CIC coordinated the creation of industrial cooperatives throughout unoccupied China to keep industrial production flowing, and it sponsored a series of industrial schools named after Alley’s friend Joseph Bailie to provide training and support.

The Indusco Bailie School Collection includes documents and photographs relating to the establishment and operation of the Bailie Schools in China during and immediately after the Second World War. Probably associated with the Indusco offices in New York City, these documents include a model constitution for industrial cooperatives, typewritten reports on Bailie Schools, and published articles describing the schools’ efforts. The reports extend through 1949, and include three mimeographed newsletters from the Shantan Bailie School for the months immediately following the school’s liberation by Communist forces. Also included are printed works by Alley and eighteen photographs taken between 1942 and 1944 of students and scenes at Bailie Schools.

Obscure in origin, the Ireland Lyceum appears to have been a fairly typical antebellum debating society, organized as an intellectually stimulating social activity for the benefit of its members. Meeting regularly, probably in the city of Holyoke, members formally debated a pre-assigned topic such as “Has America arrived at the zenith of her glory” (decided in the negative) or “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness inalienable rights,” after which the members might hear an address.

A mangled, fragmentary echo of its former self, the Constitution, by-laws, and regular proceedings of the Ireland Lyceum contains the slender records of a typical antebellum men’s debating society. The volume was later used as a scrapbook with newspaper clippings covering the pages, however the clippings have been removed from the first several pages by a conservator, revealing some of the original content.