Emeritus Professor Provides Topic of Research Project Examining Antidote to Attrition

Photo Submitted

University of Arkansas students working on a Master of Arts in Teaching are required to complete a research project for their degree. Two years ago, a group of these students wanted to examine the topic of attrition in the teaching profession.

They decided the best way to do that was to conduct qualitative research on a subject dear to their hearts, a professor of secondary education who was the entire science education program at the U of A for the first 20 years of his 30-year teaching career. Associate professor emeritus Michael Wavering taught high school science before teaching at the university level.

The students self-published the educational biography earlier this year. Unwavering: An Educational Biography of a Lifelong Educator, Dr. Michael J. Wavering is available on iBooks, a total of 1,131 pages on a phone. 

Chris Goering, associate professor of English education, and Seth French, a doctoral student, edited the book, pulling together all the pieces contributed by the 10 M.A.T. students, who have since graduated.

By exploring Wavering's life, the pre-service teachers could better understand what it means to be lifelong educators.

Goering summarized the goals for the project in the foreword:

"In a few words, I wanted this group of students to feel as though research would be their friend in their teaching careers, something that would help distinguish them from other teachers. Through the process of working on this massive project, I hoped that each contributor would learn about themselves, be challenged both by the work and by one another, and ultimately feel as though this was one of the more memorable projects ever. Oh, yeah, and I wanted all 10 students to spend the rest of their careers in education, too, and figured that studying someone who had done just that might help them model their careers in a similar fashion."

When Goering asked Wavering if the students' idea for a research project was OK with him, Wavering said, he didn't think it would amount to much. He retired in 2015.

"I thought it would be a short book, but when you've got a lot of English majors, they are going to write," Wavering said. "Two or three of them were assigned to interview me and they did multiple times, I think four times."

Wavering said there's no big secret to career longevity in his case. He said he gets stubbornness from both sides of his German family.

"It's just plain cussedness," he said. "I know that I can do a good job and I'm going to work at it. I'm not going to accept failures as a reason to quit. I take on challenges. When other people say no, I've tried to find reasons to say yes."

Wavering was pleased with the way the M.A.T. students followed through on the project.

"When you get that number of people together, they have different ways of going about an assignment," he said. "They all followed through; they all made a great contribution to it. I appreciate that."

The book delves much deeper than Wavering's self-proclaimed stubbornness. It reads like an extensively researched study, complete with numbered research questions, literature review and nine appendices. The students used previous research on lifelong educators to create a set of questions for Wavering and also interviewed his colleagues and other students, past and present.

From these conversations, they discovered several themes they believe exemplify Wavering's dedication and success as a teacher, including humility, humor, honesty, initiative, professionalism, selflessness and compassion. They studied these themes in their research on attributes of lifelong educators.

"This study could serve as a guide for the creation of supportive school environments as the demonstrated impact of these communities to resilience is strong and compelling," the authors concluded. "If we are to save public education, we must create situations that reward practitioners for their skillful balance of compassion, resilience, and professionalism and allow them to collaborate to build professional communities. These lifelong educators, as we have seen with Dr. Wavering, will then be able to lead long, successful, and rewarding careers that impact countless others after them."

The book authors are Anna Bagwell, Kate Cochran, Jessica Coomer, Lauren Fowler, Katie Hill, Paige Goodman-Wolven, Antha Johnson, Elizabeth Melton, John Morris and Brooke Schafer. Perhaps building on their English and communication backgrounds, the students also solicited and published creative contributions — poetry, letters, stories — from former and then current students of Wavering as well as from colleagues.

"Anybody that says they can do it alone, I think, is fooling themselves," the students quoted Wavering. "Teaching is such a personal thing and you don't want people to know that you're having problems. I've been fortunate to have people that I could talk to and, fortunately enough, they've listened."