Amity Buxton is, quite literally, a teacher’s teacher, having devoted much of her career and life to mentoring those who are called to the classroom. As an educator and philanthropist, she is guided by her profound respect for teachers as learners.
Buxton came of age professionally during a time of significant change in education theory. Pursuing her master’s degree at Teachers College in 1951 and 1952, she studied with Lyman Bryson, an expert in adult education and a pioneer in the educational use of radio and television. Bryson, who had recently published The Communication of Ideas, taught his students to address each class as distinct, with specific needs and interests. “His thrust was on how to compose what you are saying for the audience, rather than just passing along pieces of information,” Buxton says. She absorbed a similar focus from the work of Yale theorist Harold Lasswell, who called for assessing the effectiveness of an act of communication by analyzing five components, including “to whom” that act has been made. During the same period, in his book, The Liberal Imagination, the great critic Lionel Trilling expounded in on the power of the individual to reflect and critique.
Amity Buxton
Buxton built on these ideas in her 1962 TC doctoral thesis, writing about “literary audience,” with specific reference to the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut in the summer of 1957. Yet her vision of classroom as theater had also been augmented by an early teaching assignment in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1952, On Labor Day weekend of that year, Buxton witnessed union rallies in Detroit. “It was completely new to me,” she recalls. “I was swept away.”
Faced with a classroom equally composed of the children of auto workers and the children of management, Buxton engaged her students individually and collectively through a “threefold way of learning” predicated on an interdisciplinary curriculum, learning by doing, and measures of “alternative evaluation.” When studying Shakespeare, for example, the class performed his plays. “Everyone had a role, acting, creating costumes, or making music,” she says. At the same time, the class studied the culture and society of Elizabethan England, filling the bulletin boards with materials that illustrated the many dimensions of life in that era. Buxton evaluated student work individually and qualitatively, with reference to each child’s demonstrated learning, rather than according to uniform criteria.
Buxton engaged her students individually and collectively through a “threefold way of learning” predicated on an interdisciplinary curriculum, learning by doing, and measures of “alternative evaluation.” When studying Shakespeare, for example, the class performed his plays. “Everyone had a role, acting, creating costumes, or making music.”
“You have to look deeply into the work of each student,” she says. “You can’t focus only on punctuation and presentation. You have to try to understand, What are they trying to say?”
She employed the same approach in California a decade later, when schools in the largely white Sausalito school district merged with the mostly black schools in Marin City. Buxton was hired to train student teachers in the combined district through a state-funded program administered by San Francisco State University. With racial tensions running high (including classroom takeovers by the Black Panthers), the challenges of equitably teaching and measuring student outcomes might have proven insurmountable had not Buxton stressed assessing each child’s work on an individual basis and encouraged teachers to act as designers of curriculum and agents of individualized instruction.
“You have to look deeply into the work of each student,” she says. “You can’t focus only on punctuation and presentation. You have to try to understand, What are they trying to say?”
And from that work came one of Buxton’s crowning achievements: the establishment of a teachers’ center for use by professionals in the Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland districts. If teachers were to rethink traditional teaching frameworks and innovate in how they taught, she reasoned, they needed a place where they themselves could engage in their own “active learning” projects and trade ideas with other teachers.
At the same time, a broader movement focusing on teachers’ active learning, begun in England, was taking root in other major U.S. cities. Buxton wrote and lectured extensively, in the United States and abroad, on that topic, as well as on integrated curriculum and alternative evaluation. She served as her center’s staff development director until 1986, training teachers and principals. She also took the opportunity to educate school board members about evaluation that was “based on student work, as opposed to check-off answers on multiple-choice, standardized tests.” To illustrate her message, she shared composition notebooks that students had used to publish their own stories, with narrative and pictures, and even book covers made with cloth scraps.
After a budget crisis forced long-term staff members to take early retirement, Buxton continued part-time until 1988. She kept at her research and writing and at the same time founded a new movement in support of the spouses of people whose identities as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender had emerged after marriage. She notes that she employed the same research and networking methods in service of this new cause. As with teaching, her activism led her to publish extensively in support of what she calls the Straight Spouse Network, a movement she still passionately advances at 90.
“We need to learn how to communicate with each other, to seek to understand rather than to preach. We have to look at our whole population and see its richness, not just what is familiar.”
—Amity Buxton
Today, Buxton maintains an active interest in the wellbeing of teachers through her connection with TC. In 2001, she created an endowed scholarship to support TC students committed to teaching in urban public schools and continues making gifts to further its reach. She is an avid supporter of TC’s Peace Corps Fellows program, which fast-tracks returning volunteers to teach in the city’s high-needs public schools. In fact, Buxton is so taken with the Peace Corps that she has entrusted many of her monographs and all of her alternative assessment tools to the Peace Corps Fellows Library at TC. She also donated a technology classroom to TC to enable faculty members, students, visiting school teachers and others to explore how technology can be used to address individual students’ needs.
“We need to learn how to communicate with each other, to seek to understand rather than to preach,” Buxton says. “We have to look at our whole population and see its richness, not just what is familiar.” Indeed, she sees much about America’s circumstances that could be improved by applying the principles of active learning. “We have to think for ourselves, to look out into the world and ask what it means. We have to build our own measures of truth.”