Mary Roosevelt

Teacher Credential 1974; Lecturer; Administrator; Member of Dean’s Advisory Board
School of Education

November 1, 2009

“Teaching Out of a Suitcase”

During her childhood Sunday school classes at a Methodist Church in a little English village in the 1940s. Mary Roosevelt decided to become a missionary and work in Africa, teaching African children. It was many years later that she went to Africa, but as a teacher, not a missionary.

Her village also had a home for abandoned boys. They were housed in the old manor house, a huge property near her home. As a little girl she played with these boys of many, mixed nationalities. They had been abandoned on the docks of Liverpool, England, by their British mothers and foreign sailor fathers. As a teenager she took them on trips to local places of interest, and when she decided to train to be a teacher, the new generation of little boys became the subject of her education thesis “The Deprived Child in the Community.” She followed many of these children into their adulthood, with their successes and failures. She realized that teachers play a “make or break” role in the lives of these children. This began her lifelong passion for children, especially those who struggled to deal with the world that they were living in.

Mary did her teacher training at the Froebel Educational Institute, in Roehampton, London. Her training followed the principles of Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten programs in Germany. He believed that children learned through discovering their own environment through play activities. Mary embraced this philosophy and based her own teaching on working with individually prescribed instruction for the children she taught, within a child orientated, planned environment in her classrooms.

Her first teaching position was in a beautiful new London school in Brixton. The surrounding area was dirty and poverty ridden. Most of her students had parents who were in jail in the nearby prison. Out of forty-eight fourth graders, four were not on probation. (They had eluded prosecution for juvenile crimes). Mary felt that they needed to see a world away from the dreary area of London, so she got permission and funding to take them to the seaside in Devon. Forty-eight boarded the train in London with a project built around the ocean to keep them busy for two weeks, bound for a hotel willing to take them. It was an eye opening experience for everyone.

However, Mary had decided that after two years teaching in London, and a year teaching in the private school where she had been educated, it was time to venture overseas. She applied to the International School of Geneva, in Switzerland, and there began an adventure in educating children, which was to last a lifetime. She packed her suitcases, and all her teaching materials. (Froebel teachers make their own equipment, be it musical instruments or math scales, measuring rods, etc.)

Geneva was beautiful and she loved her lakeside apartment, but the school curriculum devastated her — American work books and ditto sheets. She complained to the director of the school, and he reminded her that he had hired her to introduce her teaching style to the school, and it was up to her to work with the parents and demonstrate how her methods were appropriate for their children. It was the first of many challenges that she faced  in her professional life overseas. She had to convince the parents that she was not going to give grades, but very detailed report cards on their students’ progress.

One Sunday evening after a very cold day skiing in the Alps, a group of the “Ecolint” teachers gathered in a little mountain restaurant for cheese fondue. Mary was the only elementary teacher in the gathering. They were all complaining about the restrictions of children being forced into studying for national examinations, English GCE, French Baccalaureate, German Abeitur, Swiss Matriculation, and American College Boards — hardly the goal of international educators. That evening an idea that had been created in UNESCO, before World War II, and was the dream of the director, Desmond Cole Baker, started to come to fruition.

Twenty five of the Ecolint teachers spent a summer visiting schools and universities across the United States of America, sounding out American teachers and universities about a possible international school curriculum. This was in 1965. In 1966, Mary was sent back to the USA, to study New Math and New Science, visiting all the Ivy League colleges and several in the UC system. She subsequently visited schools in England working on the “Nuffield Experiment” in math and science.

It was decided that she would explore the possibility of an international elementary school curriculum that would precede the planned secondary school program, now being funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The French would only cooperate if the word “Baccalaureate” was in the title of the new program. This meant that the dreams of many educators all over Europe, starting in the 1930s, were finally coming to fruition.

The International Baccalaureate had a name and an office in Geneva. Many people were now working on the logistics of producing an International K-12 curriculum, with appropriate methods of examination, acceptable world wide. Quite a challenge!

Mary was also working with a different kind of “Deprived Child in the Community.” These children were economically stable but living in unfamiliar countries, in rental homes, with pets and grandparents at home in their countries of origin. Often their parents traveled extensively, and they were left with housekeepers, au pair girls. She developed strong relationships with these children and their families, and is still in touch with many of them today.

In 1966, Mary was asked to put together an international conference in Geneva to draft an international elementary curriculum. She had explored different ideas in the USA and Europe. Now she was sent to Africa to share ideas and listen to the teachers in international schools there. Once again she packed her materials, ready to demonstrate materials and ideas that she had acquired from all her other overseas travels. She traveled from west to east, under less than perfect conditions, with many adventures along the way.

That summer the conference took place in Geneva, and the first draft of the international elementary school curriculum came into being.

In 1968 Mary was asked to become the Principal of the Junior House of the United Nations International School of New York. Again she packed her suitcases and her teaching equipment.

This school was another challenge. The school was housed in an old New York school, PS 40. It was a temporary home while the new U.N. school was being planned, designed, and built on land fill in the East River. There were challenges protecting the children of diplomats and working with a very diversified faculty. She worked on fine tuning the new elementary school curriculum and introducing the first grade bilingual classroom, which was taught in English and French by herself and a French teacher. Again, this involved individualized instruction for children who, like the children in Geneva, were challenged by living and moving all over the world with irregular visits to a home base.

The International Baccalaureate Curriculum started to meet some of those challenges. The UN secondary school only offered the IB, and a world wide movement had begun. Students could change countries and schools but their study program went with them

Then Mary’s world of international education came to an abrupt halt when she married James Roosevelt in 1969, and returned to Switzerland.

It was several years before she thought about working in the educational field again. Her daughter Rebecca had been born in Geneva in 1971, and the family moved to California a few months later. In 1974 Mary completed an American California Teaching Credential in the Office of Teacher Education at UC Irvine.

She was offered a job supervising student teachers at UCI. When she became the Coordinator for the Multiple Subject Credential Program, she spent many years helping to build an effective teacher training program where schools, districts, specially trained teachers, the student teachers, and students all worked together to help children learn effectively, no matter what their background. This was called the Professional Development School Program, and was explained in the October 2009 profile of Dr. Linda Clinard.

During her years at UCI, Mary saw the “Office” become the Department of Education and with this, the expansion of its faculty and programs.

Mary happily retired in 1999, after forty years in the world of education. Today she continues her very busy life, as shown in the attached resume. Most of all she loves being with her two grandchildren.

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