Karen Seashore, Ph.D.
Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development
Regents Professor Karen Seashore teaches her students that there can be surprising nuggets of brilliance hiding just below the surface of any research topic.
“If you see a social problem, such as a problem in a school, how can you push that up and look at it from a variety of perspectives and theoretical frameworks to try to explain it?” asks Seashore, who has used that question to guide her career as a leading educational researcher.
Most recently, Seashore has been exploring the effects of state policies on local and school leaders. Her previous research had affirmed the general assumption that state and federal policies can affect what principals and teachers do, though those effects are fairly limited and indirect. Digging deeper into case studies, however, Seashore and her colleagues found that district leaders and their policies are actually far more important than state and federal policies and incentives.
“Education in its community context is still very, very important in the U.S. educational system,” explains Seashore, “and until it is incorporated more clearly into state and federal policies, we are likely to have the uneven and piecemeal reforms that we currently see.”
A third-generation academic and self-described “faculty brat” from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Seashore trained as a sociologist at Swarthmore College and Columbia University. At Columbia her professors included sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, whose renowned research into how people use Green Stamps taught her a valuable lesson in how to look at an ordinary problem and find the research jewel, she says.
“I had no intention of teaching education,” says Seashore, “but there were theoretical questions in education that interested me, so I bounced over [from sociology] to education and, 30-some years later, I guess I qualify as an educational researcher!” In 2009, the University Council for Educational Administration recognized her as such with its Roald F. Campbell Lifetime Achievement Award.
Seashore views education through the lens of an organizational sociologist, analyzing problems in education as social-system questions rather than focusing on “bad” administrators, teachers, or kids. The challenge to researchers, students, and professionals, says Seashore, is constantly bridging theory and practice. “We’re faced with enormous system problems,” says Seashore. “[Critics of the educational system] have grasped onto an extremely complex problem and are trying to understand it in a simple-minded way.”
Since joining the University of Minnesota in 1987, Seashore has served as department chair, associate dean, and director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement. She was recently named a Regents Professor, the highest faculty honor that the University grants. Seashore received the Robert H. Beck Faculty Teaching award in 2007 and is current director of undergraduate studies for her department. She also holds the inaugural Robert Holmes Beck Chair of Ideas in Education, named in memory of the long-time faculty member and Regents Professor.
“I knew Bob Beck, and I adored him,” says Seashore. “He was a great human being and a powerful thinker; a man of big ideas.” The chair encourages scholarly activity that promotes a better understanding of the conceptual foundations underlying critical issues in education.
Story by Kara Rose | Photo by Dawn Villella | May 2010
