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Timeline

1894

At a cost of $155,000, the University completes a new library building with an imposing classical exterior inspired by the Temple of Neptune in Pesto, Greece. In 1931, the building will be renamed Burton Hall in the memory of University President Marion Burton, and become the home of the College of Education.

1892

Louise Kiehle, David Kiehle’s daughter, is hired to launch the Department of Physical Culture for Women (which was later absorbed into the college’s kinesiology program). During her eight years on the faculty, she sets her program’s goal to help women “develop a strong and symmetrical physique with a graceful and easy carriage.” She involves the University’s women in tennis, calisthenics, and the new game of basketball.

1891

The Reverend David L. Kiehle, Minnesota’s state superintendent of public instruction, starts lecturing in pedagogy, giving the first systematic series of courses on that topic. Seven years earlier, the University of North Dakota had used his phrase, “Intelligence, the Basis of Civilization” as a motto in its official seal. As the sole member of the University of Minnesota’s new Department of Pedagogy, Kiehle is an early believer in the importance of professional training for teachers, equating it to medical training for physicians. He maintains that the University should instruct prospective teachers to apply “modern scholarship to the problems of…education.” Many of his colleagues, however, consider his notions unrealistic, and Kiehle is dismissed from his position in 1902.

Timeline

1885

Harry Pratt Judson, professor of history and lecturer on pedagogics, expands upon Maria Sanford’s work in pedagogy and becomes the University’s first faculty member in education. (Judson had previously advised Charles Burke Elliott, the University’s first recipient of a Ph.D.) As a former school principal in Troy, NY, he is well-suited to the work. He becomes a strong advocate of extension education for working people and emphasizes the practical aspects of pedagogy. He believes, according to one contemporary, that “the purpose of the school is to prepare students for life.” Judson later spends sixteen years as the president of the University of Chicago.

1881

Maria Sanford, an energetic professor of education and rhetoric, presents the first lectures on the art and theory of teaching ever offered at the University. Effective pedagogy, she believed, depended on the skilled use of language; she set out to see how our language has been actually used, and by what means a correct and elegant style can be acquired. Sanford, who had arrived at the University just a year earlier after becoming, at Swarthmore College, one of the first women in America ever to rise to the rank of full professor, was a master teacher of public presentation and argument. (In 1900, in fact, she used her rhetorical skills to ignite public support for the land preserve that is today known as Chippewa National Forest.)

In addition, Sanford fervently believed that the classroom could serve as a forum for the spread of moral and cultural values. Through her retirement in 1909, she regularly hosted groups of students in her home near campus. In 1958, 38 years after her death, she became one of two Minnesotans honored with a likeness in Statuary Hall of the United States Capitol.

Timeline

1879

University President William Watts Folwell recommends that the institution look into hiring its first teacher-training instructor.

Timeline

1869

After 18 years of planning, fundraising, and construction, the University of Minnesota offers its first classes.

1860

The state legislature mandates that the University of Minnesota will offer “an opportunity for the training of teachers for the common schools of the state, in which shall be taught the theory and practice of teaching and everything that will perfect the elementary and other public schools of the state.” For many years, the University takes no action to follow this directive.

Timeline

1858

In the same year that Minnesota attains statehood, Winona State Normal School, the state’s first institution for the training of schoolteachers, opens. As time passes, “normal schools”—so named from the French term ecole normale, indicating the standardization of educational programs for teachers—increasingly draw criticism for their modest expectations of teacher-students, who often end their training there. More scholarly, university-based teacher training programs gain momentum as a result.

1851

By an act of the Territorial Legislature, the University of Minnesota is created. At the time, the entire population of Minnesota Territory is less than half the enrollment at the University would be a century later.

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Photos courtesy of University of Minnesota Archives, College of Education and Human Development, Minnesota Historical Society, and Library of Congress.