Professor Jeanne Connell, Ph.D.

Biography

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to students in EPS 201 on a more personal level. I grew up in a small coastal town in Maine. The town had 4,000 residents during the fall, winter and spring, but expanded to more than 6,000 during the summer months. Camden is known for its beautiful harbor and for its summer arts programs.

I grew up thinking every little town had a summer theater, chamber concerts, and art galleries. Overall, Maine is not a very prosperous state, it relies heavily on tourism as its major industry. Other industries include: paper, logging, fishing, and potatoes.

My ethnic background reflects a fairly typical New England heritage. I am part Irish and part English. My father's family left Ireland after the potato famine in the 1840s and migrated to Canada. Later, generations entered the United States from the province of New Brunswick and settled in Boston. The O' was dropped from O'Connell to Americanize the name since people of Irish descent were discriminated against, especially in urban areas like Boston. My mother's family descended from English sailors who worked on ships taking lumber from Maine to Boston during the 19th century. My mother grew up in Camden and her family farmed and worked in local textile mills. I have three brothers and one sister.

My father graduated from high school, served in the Pacific in World War II, and then worked for the U. S. Postal Service in Camden until he retired. My mother, who grew up in Camden, graduated from high school, attended a one-year business school in Boston, and then worked as a bookkeeper until she retired.

My grandfather was a math teacher and later a principal. He worked as a teacher in a number of small towns and in some very remote rural schools in Maine. Since he changed schools frequently, he lived away from his family during the school year. He left public education after about ten years and spent the remaining part of his working life as a carpenter and farmer in Camden. My older sister was also an educator. She was a high school English teacher and taught in Wisconsin for over twenty years. My brothers also graduated from the University of Maine, and two of them have received advanced degrees. As you can see, education has been an important part of my family's history.

I attended public school in Camden. My graduating class contained 100 students. In high school, I was in a college track, and took classes with same 30 students for four years. My college career began at the University of Maine. I majored in psychology and minored in education. I graduated in 1973 with a BA in psychology and was also certified as a special education teacher. I taught in a special education program or several years in Maine. After moving to Pennsylvania, I worked for ten years in adult education programs, mostly with persons who had physical and sensory disabilities.

During this time, I became active in the local disability rights movement. I worked with others in Pennsylvania to promote full accessibility for people with disabilities to public facilities, transportation, and housing. I also headed a state-wide project that researched the need for in-home services that would allow persons with disabilities to live independently in the community, rather than being institutionalized. As a result of this study and other efforts by local disability rights groups, Pennsylvania instituted in-home attendant care services in 1987.

While working at the University of Pennsylvania in a program for students with disabilities, I completed a masters degree from University of Pennsylvania in the history of American education. In 1988, my husband became a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and I entered the Ph. D. program at the University of Illinois in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. I served as a research assistant to Professors Paul Violas, Steve Tozer, and Walter Feinberg. I worked as a teaching assistant in EPS 201 under Professor Paul Violas and was named to the Incomplete List of Teachers Judged Excellent by their Students. I completed my degree in Philosophy of Education in the fall of 1993. I taught part-time at Illinois State and then was hired full-time at the University of Illinois. My research focuses primarily on questions about the nature of knowledge, and how our views about knowledge translate into educational theory. My thesis examined how theories of knowledge in pragmatic philosophy have been used in reading theory to change how we view the relationship between the reader and the text. Other areas of interest include: Social Foundations of Education, New Movements in Pragmatic Philosophy, and Feminist Theory.