Dr. Diana Rogers-Adkinson inspires students to be innovators

Dr. Diana Rogers-Adkinson has been the dean of the College of Education at Southeast Missouri State University since 2012. She currently also serves as the interim director of the University Autism Center. Rogers-Adkinson is passionate about educating students and equipping them with the tools they need to become powerful and effective educators themselves. She is working to improve the College of Education with the EDvolution program and has helped pilot the use of iPads in the classroom as educational tools.

How did you get to this point?

I am in my third year at Southeast Missouri State as the dean of the College of Education. Before that I spent 14 years at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. My background has been in special education and also in counseling. I did two doctoral degrees at once when I did my graduate work. So kind of my background has been always working with children with emotional disturbance or children with autism, but my expertise kind of blended that special education and the mental health side around children with mental illness as my primary area. While I was at Whitewater I was the chair of the Department of Special Education for six years, also was director of a freshman initiative of freshman learning communities. So I did a couple of different things on that campus, was recruited here and it just seemed like the right match at that time in terms of the things they were looking for in the next leader for the College of Education and the skillset that I thought I would bring here.

How did you get involved with the University Autism Center?

Well, when I first became dean I chaired a committee on campus under the work of the provost to determine where should the autism center be housed on our campus, and the provost decided that the College of Ed. would be the more natural home for the autism center for having somebody who would supervise. So my job was to supervise the director, who at that time was Connie Hébert. Right now we have just named the next director, but she will not be starting until August. So I've been serving and will serve as the interim director of the autism center for a year.

Could you explain the changes happening in the College of Education and what your role has been?

There's really two major ways in which the College of Education has been going through changes. One is by our choice, and that's what we call our EDvolution. A couple of years ago a group of faculty started piloting the use of iPads in the classroom. You've probably seen a lot of school districts in the region went one-to-one, and so we began with those faculty beginning a pilot. They've had really positive feedback.

At the same time, as dean I have two advisory boards, one with schools in the north and the second with school districts in the south. The number one piece of feedback they were giving us is our students needed to leave here tech independent. They didn't feel that it's the district's responsibility to get our beginning teachers effective in using technology in the schools, that that should be a part of teacher training. Well if you're going to do that well, that's not just students sitting in a computer lab. You know, school districts that have gone one-to-one, it's an infusion model, and so we decided that was the right path for us to take in terms of launching our EDvolution and integrating the iPad technology into our curriculum, having our students use it from freshman all the way through the senior year. We're getting a lot of very, very positive feedback from our school district partners that we definitely did the right thing. I had one superintendent say, "I'm telling my seniors if they want to go into education, they should go to you because you're right, this is what we want to see in teacher training." Apple's been out a few times, they're really impressed with what we're doing. They think that the way that we've launched this has been really pretty cool, and so it's really exciting to see external responses to how we're doing this.

What makes up a quality leader?

There are a lot of things that go into leadership. For me, my most important feature is always thinking about it from a mentorship perspective. I always want to know what the folks that I'm leading want from me and what they want for themselves. Some of my department chairs might want to be a dean some day. It's my job, not only to help them do their job effectively in the role that they're in, but to know what skills and assets that they want to learn for their next steps and aspirations as a professional as well. So I really see it as a mentorship and support so that the team can accomplish the goals, not only the goals of the institution but your personal goals.

I like to work. I enjoy working, and I think work should be fun because we spend so much time doing it. To me, a leader helps people enjoy coming to work everyday. You know, when I look at the changes I'm seeing between our students and faculty as they interact with a silly device like an iPad, which seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, but last week we had an "Appy Wednesday" and we do those once a month where students and faculty share a cool app that they've learned and they want to show off to others and it's one that they haven't learned in classes. Watching students become leaders and faculty the listener, and "Oh, wow, that's really cool!" Leadership allows those things to happen so everybody is really shining. To me, that's always the most important part of the job.

How do you train students to be leaders as educators?

Well, one, we are asking them to think differently. And I can really see how our students are beginning to realize the power of what they're learning by, for example, using the one-to-one initiative. In the beginning, "Why do I need this when I'm a freshman when I'm not necessarily in ed. classes?" And then I have a student come back to me and say, "Oh, I'm in this science class and I'm doing screenshots of my lab, I'm using my note-taking device that will flip that into flash cards," which there are apps that do that for you. And then, "When the [professor] is putting up things that I want to remember that I can't write down myself, I'm screenshotting that." That now they're beginning to think simultaneously while being a student user about a skill they're going to have to teach their own future students. So even though they may not be in a core education course, they're beginning to think about the pedagogy their professor gives them at the same time they're the learner themselves.

I think that's going to make them more powerful educators in the future because they are thinking about, "How do I take knowledge from my classes in a way that may help me regardless of what discipline I'm going into? I may be in a science class, but those are skills that I can give my student," no matter what course they're taking and how to be more effective learners themselves. So I see it starting to mesh together, and that's cool to watch.