Genesis and Early Evolution of the Yearbook Series of the American Council on Industrial Arts Teacher Education

Patrick Foster

The Council on Technology Teacher Education (CTTE)’s 2011 yearbook is its sixtieth, making the series one of the longest-lived of its kind in the US. The yearbook series was founded in part to demonstrate the intellectual maturity of the field; today professionals in the field affirm its “uninterrupted tradition of scholarly excellence and promotion of discourse in technology teacher education” ( De Miranda, 2007 , p. iii). On the other hand, volumes have also been characterized by uniformity in ideology and the selection of topics and authors (e.g., Braundy, 1999 ; Petrina, 1998 ; Ritz, 1999 ).

Yearbook decisions are made by the 11-member Yearbook Planning Committee, chaired by the CTTE’s past president for a three-year term. The remaining ten members serve staggered five-year terms; the council’s executive committee (its officers and past-president) selects two new members each year to replace two veterans. Proposals for future yearbooks are accepted, rejected, or tabled as packages; that is, when the committee formally schedules a yearbook, it has accepted not only the topic, but also the editors, table of contents, and chapter authors.

Neither the committee structure nor the yearbook approval process has changed since 1962. Yet, as I argue in this article, both are fundamental deviations from the original conception of the yearbook program of the American Council on Industrial Arts Teacher Education (ACIATE)—the name under which the CTTE operated until 1986.

The questions of how and why the series assumed its current form have been inadequately addressed in the literature. Aside from brief discussions in three of the yearbooks themselves, and in reviews of some individual books, Chapter 4 of Kinzy’s (1973) dissertation contains the only treatment of the ACIATE yearbooks as a series.

Kinzy’s dissertation, the only history of the ACIATE, was partly underwritten by the Council itself. It is a history of the organization seen through the eyes of Whitesel, Williams, and Hunt, each of whom was interviewed extensively, and each of whom reviewed and commented on a pre-publication draft of the study. The paper’s lack of critique and skepticism may also be partly explained by the fact that among the three members of Kinzy’s dissertation committee were the ACIATE’s President and immediate Past-President.

Purpose and Approach

This article is an attempt to trace the development of the ACIATE yearbook series to the point at which it established the modus operandi in place today. I sought to discover why and how the series evolved into a form so different from the original plan. In addition to published materials, I drew upon a number of primary sources in the archives of the American Industrial Arts Association (AIAA), the parent organization of the ACIATE. These records are part of the archives of the International Technology and Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA), held by the Helen A. Ganser Library, Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Although reliance on the Kinzy (1973) study is problematic, his section on “The Prodigious Undertaking” (pp. 102-112) included valuable data unavailable in the archives.

This article is divided into two main sections, synthesis and analysis. In the first, I try to recover the early development of the yearbook series, emphasizing changes in leadership, locus of influence, and decisionmaking structure. In the second section, I analyze the record to address this question: How and why did the ACIATE’s yearbook program evolve from its original intent into its present form? An appendix includes brief biographies of eight people who had significant impacts on the series.

Synthesis

The desire to establish an industrial arts teacher education yearbook predated the 1939 formation of the AIAA. In the late 1930s, for example, R. Lee Hornbake “used to complain that industrial arts was not well thought of among other educators largely because we had no yearbook” ( Coover, 1964 , p. 1). Hornbake would later help shape the ACIATE series. DeWitt T. Hunt, a founder of the ACIATE and president of the AIAA, agreed: “perhaps one of the basic criteria of a profession is the existence of literature found only in the group’s yearbook” (1949, as cited in Kinzy, 1973 , p. 40).

The ACIATE was organized in 1950 as the first special-interest section of the AIAA. The annual convention of the AIAA would also include the ACIATE’s yearly meetings. According to Hunt, head of industrial arts at Oklahoma A&M College, “The officers were not long in achieving their number one goal — of producing a ‘Yearbook’ for the Council” ( 1960 , p. 104).

The 70 attendees at that first meeting agreed that the yearbooks would be topical, and that each would be scheduled several years in advance (e.g., Hunt, 1950 ). Each September or October, the next year’s volume would be sent to the printer so that copies would be available for distribution at the AIAA conference the following April or May.

Early Yearbooks

The ACIATE’s first president was Walter R. Williams, Jr. (not to be confused with his son, Walter R. Williams III (1933-2007), the 17th ACIATE president), professor of education at the University of Florida and immediate past president of the AIAA. On August 9, 1951, Williams visited the offices of McKnight & McKnight Publishing, where he discussed the production of the yearbook with William McKnight, Jr. and Wesley D. Stephens. Under the agreement they reached, the publisher would “underwrite the entire costs of producing and disseminating [the] yearbooks… profits received from the sale of these volumes will be forwarded to the Council Treasury by the publishers who have agreed to absorb any annual losses which may arise” ( Williams, 1952 , n.p.). When McKnight sold the company in 1983, he was able to influence the new ownership to continue the arrangement, which continued through the first 57 volumes (see Seymour, 2009 ).

The ACIATE’s responsibility was “the development of material and the editorial phase of this project,” which McKnight said would “rest entirely with the officers and the editorial committees of your Council” ( 1951 , p. 1). Unlike McKnight, the organizers and early leaders of the ACIATE made little distinction between “the officers and the editorial committees;” the original constitution referred only to a “Publications Committee” ( “Proposed Constitution,” 1951 , p. 9). Williams became chairman of this committee in 1950. In this capacity, he oversaw the first three volumes of the yearbook series and the planning phases of the next two (See Table 1, Next Page).

Table 1
ACIATE Yearbooks Approved During Walter R. Williams, Jr.’s Term as Chair of the Publications and Yearbook Planning Committee (1950-54)

Volume	Title	Editors and Institutions
† Williams, listed as “Editor-in-Chief, Yearbook Series,” later identified himself as the book’s editor.
1952 (1st)	Inventory-Analysis of Industrial Arts Teacher Education Facilities, Personnel, and Programs	Walter R. Williams, Jr.; Harvey K. Meyer, Jr. (U. Florida)
1953 (2nd)	Who’s Who in Industrial Arts Teacher Education	Williams; Roy F. Bergengren, Jr. (U. Florida)
1954 (3rd)	Some Components of Current Leadership; Techniques of Selection and Guidance of Graduate Students; An Analysis of Textbook Emphasis	Williams †
1955 (4th)	Superior Practices in Industrial Arts Teacher Education	R. Lee Hornbake; Donald P. Maley (U. Maryland)
1956 (5th)	Problems and Issues In Industrial Arts Teacher Education	C. Robert Hutchcroft (U. Michigan)

To get the series started, Williams oversaw data collection for what would become yearbooks 1 and 2. The following year, Hornbake started work on the next volume. Williams and the other officers faced the first crisis of the new series when it became evident that Hornbake’s Superior Practices in Industrial Arts Teacher Education , scheduled as yearbook 3, would not be completed on time. Without a backup yearbook in progress, and without time to create a new book, Williams sent McKnight & McKnight the dissertations of three of his students to constitute the volume ( Kinzy, 1973 ).

Formation of the Yearbook Planning Committee

John A. Whitesel of Miami University of Ohio, who had done much of the work to establish the ACIATE, was especially concerned that the council nearly missed publishing the 1954 yearbook. But when he became the council’s president in September 1954, he discovered that a second potential crisis loomed. No plan was in place for yearbook 5, which would be due to the publisher in a year ( Whitesel, 1956 ); yet the ACIATE publications committee was not scheduled to meet until April 1955. The possibility of skipping a volume in a “yearbook” series was real; it had happened to the National Art Education Association in 1950 (by 1954 the NAEA series probably appeared to be back on its feet. But in 1957 the series became a biennial publication, and the group’s last “yearbook” per se was published in 1959). Regarding the root of the problem as poor planning (e.g., 1956), Whitesel assembled a ten-member ad hoc yearbook committee and called “an emergency meeting of a sub-committee” of five members, including Williams as chair, at the end of September ( Whitesel, 1954a , p. 11).

Whitesel published a report of this meeting in the next edition of the Industrial Arts Teacher , the AIAA’s journal. Although he made it clear to ACIATE members that the leadership was acting to assure that the series would “be able to continue in a high professional tone” (p. 11), there is no evidence that the membership at large had exhausted its patience after the first three yearbooks. But at least some pressure was being applied from another quarter. As Whitesel later recalled,

The McKnight and McKnight Publishing Co. [had] asked that a Yearbook Planning Committee be a continuous thing so that there will not be a break with the changing of officers. The Executive Committee has concurred and has developed a plan of having ten members on the Yearbook Planning Committee – two of whom are to be replaced each year. …The president of the Council will [by] virtue of his office act as Chairman for the Committee. ( Whitesel, 1956 , p. 1-2)

Although McKnight and Stephens had agreed to a very generous publishing arrangement, they apparently wanted some influence over the planning model. The ACIATE responded, and in less than a year, Whitesel and the committee had lined up topics, editors, and authors for 1956, 1957, and 1958, and had selected the 1959 topic. This began a four-year period in which the committee maintained a cushion of at least three future books (See Table 2, Next Page).

Table 2
ACIATE Yearbook Committee Chairs, 1950-1964, and the Number of Future Yearbooks Approved and Accrued at the Time of Each Annual Conference

ACIATE Yearbook Committee chair †	Year	n future yearbooks
		1	2	3	4	5	6
KEY ν : yearbook accepted and scheduled at this conference; ν : yearbook accepted and scheduled some time before the conference; ν: volume number. Notes: Does not include Who’s Who in Industrial Arts Teacher Education 1969 , an unnumbered supplement to the series. † Not a formal position until 1955. * Hornbake resigned when he became Associate Dean at Maryland. ACIATE Vice-president Fuzak succeeded him, then was elected to a 2-year term.
Walter R. Williams Jr.	1951	1	2
	1952	2
	1953	3
	1954	4
John A. Whitesel	1955	5	6	8
	1956	6	8	7	9
R. Lee Hornbake * / John A. Fuzak	1957	7	8	9
	1958	8	9	10
	1959	10	9
	1960	10	11
Donald Maley	1961	11	12	13	14	15	16
	1962	12	13	14	15	16
	1963	13	14	15	16
	1964	14	15	16	17

The planning committee approved four yearbooks while Whitesel was its chair (See Table 3, Next Page). As all were in process when he left the office, he left his successor with a comfortable margin.

Table 3
Yearbooks Approved During John A. Whitesel’s Term (1954-56) as ACIATE Yearbook Planning Committee Chair

Volume	Title	Editors and Institutions
† Original editor Robert L. Thompson (NYU) died in 1958.
1957 (6th)	A Sourcebook of Readings in Education	Carl Gerbracht; Gordon O. Wilbur (SUNY–Oswego)
1958 (7th)	The Accreditation of Industrial Arts Teacher Education	Verne C. Fryklund (Stout State College); H. L. Helton (Northeast State College, OK)
1959 (8th)	Planning Industrial Arts Facilities	Ralph K. Nair; Paul L. Scherer; Lynne C. Monroe (U. California–Santa Barbara)
1960 (9th)	Research in Industrial Arts Education	Raymond Van Tassel (New York U.) †

Limits of Committee Decision-Making

When John A. Fuzak assumed the dual role as ACIATE president and yearbook planning committee chair in 1958, he wrote an open letter to the council’s membership, reminding his readers that any ACIATE member could propose a yearbook topic and meet with the committee to discuss it. The message, unstated in Fuzak’s letter but clear from memos and meeting notes, was that the committee itself had become an insufficient source of ideas for future yearbooks; the letter was part of a strategy to solicit proposals from outside the committee. But a few months later, Fuzak’s coordination of this effort was postponed by more immediate problems.

Late in 1958, Fuzak wrote to the committee about the death Robert L. Thompson, who was to be the editor of the 1960 book. Furthermore, he added, no topic or editor(s) had been chosen for the 1961 book. Ultimately, a replacement was found for Thompson, and at the convention in April, the committee selected Graduate Study in Industrial Arts as the tenth yearbook (1961), to be edited by Herber Sotzin.

About a year later, history repeated when Sotzin died on January 6, 1960. By the end of the month, Fuzak informed the committee via mail that he had found a possible replacement. Referring to the lack of a plan for the 1962 book, he enclosed several proposals for that publication, at least five of which contained detailed outlines. He asked the committee to “please react immediately” on the “selection of our next Yearbook topic” ( 1960a , p. 1).

About five weeks prior to the AIAA convention at which the yearbook meeting would be held, Fuzak wrote to Donald Lux on behalf of the committee, sending him an “outline … intended only to suggest ideas to an editor who might accept responsibility for the Yearbook.” The book, Curricular Approaches in Industrial Arts , would be “due at the publishers on October 1, 1961” ( 1960b , p. 1). Lux, of the University of Illinois, responded with a one-page proposal on an entirely different topic, The Pre-Service Preparation of Industrial Arts . At their 1960 meeting, the yearbook committee accepted the Lux proposal. This was the first time a yearbook planning committee approved a yearbook without exercising substantial input.

Fuzak was able to leave his successor with a backlog of two yearbooks (Table 4). He also left a precedent that would be regularly observed for the next fifty years; future yearbook committees would consider package proposals, which would include the yearbook topic, editor, chapter topic, and (in most cases) chapter authors.

Table 4
Yearbooks Approved During John A. Fuzak’s Term (1957-60) as Chair of the ACIATE Yearbook Committee

Volume	Title	Editors and Institutions
† Original editor Herber A. Sotzin (San Jose State) died in 1960.
1961 (10th)	Graduate Study in Industrial Arts	Ralph P. Norman; Ralph C. Bohn (San Jose State U.) †
1962 (11th)	Essentials of Preservice Preparation	Donald G. Lux (U. Illinois)

Convention Emerges

At the end of 1960, Fuzak wrote to incoming ACIATE president and yearbook chair Donald Maley. Fuzak referred to his attempts to solicit yearbook proposals from the membership at large:

It was our hope that individuals and small groups would be coming forward with proposals to the Yearbook Committee which might be screened by the committee... I am afraid that it has not worked out as well as we thought it might. ...while this is an ideal way to operate[,] and members should be encouraged to forward proposals to the committee, the committee itself must be active in developing ideas. I would suggest that several of the members of the Yearbook Committee who are in your vicinity get together and work out some rough outlines for future yearbooks. ...I am sure that you must be getting somewhat nervous about future selections. ( 1960c , p. 2)

Whether or not Maley was getting nervous, it seems that the executives at McKnight & McKnight had again become concerned about the ACIATE’s management of the series.

In November, Wesley Stephens wrote to Maley, urging him to consider a yearbook idea from John Rowlett of Eastern Kentucky University. Maley wrote the committee a month later, saying, “As an item of special concern to this committee, I would like to have your reaction to the following suggestion which I received from Wes Stephens” (1960, p. 1).

About three months later, Stephens wrote directly to the yearbook committee, indicating that, at the company’s expense, McKnight & McKnight would host a dinner for them prior to their meeting on April 5. Potential editors and editors of books in progress would also be invited. Stephens also repeated the possibility of a yearbook edited by Rowlett, ending the memo with, “I am informing him of the planning committee meeting and inviting him to attend [emphasis added] if he wishes to outline this matter for committee consideration” (1961, p. 1,).

At the post-dinner meeting the committee approved the topics and editors for five yearbooks (Table 5). Rowlett was chosen to edit yearbook 15.

Table 5
ACIATE Yearbooks Approved on April 5, 1961

Volume	Title	Editors and Institutions
1963 (12th)	Action and Thought in Industrial Arts Education	Ethan A. T. Svendsen (Indiana State U.)
1964 (13th)	Classroom Research in Industrial Arts	Charles B. Porter (Illinois State U.)
1965 (14th)	Approaches and Procedures in Industrial Arts	G. S. Wall (Stout State U.)
1966 (15th)	Status of Research in Industrial Arts	John D. Rowlett (Eastern Kentucky U.)
1967 (16th)	Evaluation Guidelines for Contemporary Industrial Arts Programs	Lloyd P. Nelson; William T. Sargent (Ball State College)

Under the previous arrangement, Maley’s term as yearbook committee chair should have ended at the close of the 1962 AIAA convention. But during the council’s business meeting at the convention, he made a motion “that the immediate past President will automatically become Chairman of the Yearbook Committee for a two year term” ( “Minutes,” 1962 ).

The motion carried. Some private debate followed after the convention as to whether Ralph Gallington, the new ACIATE president, should chair the committee despite Maley’s motion (e.g., Wall, 1962 ; Gallington, 1962 ), but the ACIATE constitution did not clearly specify who had oversight of the yearbook series. Maley served two more years as committee chair, and the constitution was amended to institutionalize the motion. The structure of the committee has not changed since.

Analysis

Between 1925 and 1950, several national education associations had inaugurated yearbook series, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Council for the Social Studies, and the National Art Education Association. But the yearbook program with perhaps the most marked influence on the ACIATE’s founders was the 48-year-old series of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE). John Dewey, David Snedden, and Frederick Bonser were among the NSSE participants who would have been recognized by the founders of the ACIATE as important figures in the history of industrial arts in the US.

The Original Conception of Yearbook Planning

In addition to the inspiration of the NSSE books themselves, it seems that the ACIATE’s founders envisioned yearbook committees similar to those of the NSSE. Members of these committees, who would possess expertise in the subject of the yearbook, would serve as the chapter authors. And each would represent some diversity of philosophy—thus the need for a chairperson to ensure balance in the final volume.

In the original operational model of the ACIATE yearbook series, open meetings would facilitate debate and eventual consensus on future yearbook topics and contributors. At the same meetings, the authors and editors of in-process yearbooks would report on their progress. Ideally, drafts of the chapters would be distributed and discussed ( Whitesel, 1954b ). Through such measures, council members could influence the yearbooks without being elected to a committee—or perhaps more precisely, the ACIATE members would collectively be the yearbook planning committee. This conception is clear, not only from private correspondence, but from items published in the Industrial Arts Teacher (e.g., “American Council Meeting,” 1950 ; Hunt, 1950 ; Whitesel, 1954b ) and from programs of early ACIATE meetings.

It is also evident that the council’s organizers wished to make progress quickly. They formed a publications committee and hoped to publish their inaugural yearbook even before the group adopted a constitution. Reconciling such in camera decisions with the published ideal of democratic, group decision-making suggests that the early yearbooks were to be transitional volumes until a critical mass of topics and personnel could be achieved. Accordingly, the four-member publications committee was more focused on the technical aspects of publishing than on the content of the yearbooks.

Meanwhile, virtually all-important decisions regarding the first four yearbooks were made by the ACIATE executive committee, a group of four or five men. On one hand, the yearbook series may not have survived its fledgling stage if all decisions, trivial or critical, had to be postponed until the next annual meeting. On the other, it was during this stage that the council’s leadership and membership became accustomed to yearbook decisions being made in executive session.

The story of yearbook 3, Superior Practices in Industrial Arts Teacher Education , is a pertinent example. Each ACIATE member would likely have been aware of this volume before it was to be published in 1954. R. Lee Hornbake and Donald Maley had begun collecting data for the book in 1952 by contacting personnel representing all 203 industrial arts teacher education programs in the US. Announcements about the upcoming book were made at the AIAA conferences in 1952 and 1953, and were also reported in the Industrial Arts Teacher .

But, in February 1954, this notice was printed in the Industrial Arts Teacher :

Because of late returns by members, publication of what was to be Yearbook III had to be postponed until next year. Fortunately, work on the 1955 yearbook was sufficiently advanced so that it could be completed by the publisher’s deadline, and will be released as Yearbook III. (“Los Angeles,” p. 11)

This was the first published mention of a “1955 yearbook,” and no further details were provided. Nearly every Industrial Arts Teacher since 1950 had included a discussion of upcoming yearbooks, so the existence of a 1955 yearbook, or plans for one, must have been a surprise to many ACIATE members.

At the April 1954 convention, William McKnight, Jr. presented the book, Leadership, Graduate Preparation, and Textbook Analysis in Industrial Arts Teacher Education , stating that “the authors ... produced the Yearbook by each writing a part” ( “ACIATE Membership,” 1954 ).

The idea that the three dissertations assembled to constitute yearbook 3 were parts of a whole, or that such a collection had been planned as the 1955 yearbook, appears to be completely false. Correspondence among Williams and the executive committee during this time contained no such references, and just months after its publication, the yearbook planning committee adopted a general policy not to reprint dissertations. Williams and Stephens later explained to Kinzy that yearbook 3 was an eleventh-hour “stopgap” measure, “necessary to provide continuity” (p. 108).

A year later, Whitesel expressed “no doubt [that] the membership is aware of the double emergency situation which faced the officers last September” ( 1955 , p. 24). Yet at least in terms of official publications, it seems that the ACIATE leadership had tried to keep the membership unaware of the Yearbook 3 situation (Whitesel was not a member of the ACIATE executive committee during the 1952-53 and 1953-54 academic years and may not have been involved in this episode. During his subsequent term as president he twice acknowledged, in print, awkward “emergencies” which had befallen the yearbook series), then explained that the last-minute substitution was “because of late returns by members.”

The ideals of the four-year-old group had yet to be met. Group decision-making remained untried. The books themselves—essentially the results of studies—had fallen short of the ambition of a series of topical collections of the best thinking in the field. Those who worked to produce the volumes must have more closely resembled a tight-knit group (Table 6) than a meritocracy. Despite this close association, this group represented an ideological diversity which would become apparent over the next decade.

Table 6
Chief Contributors to ACIATE Yearbooks 1 through 4 and Their Institutional Affiliations.

Yearbook Contributor	Vols.	Doctorate	Advisor’s Doctorate	Primary Employer
Note: “Primary employer” is where the contributor worked the longest.
Walter R. Williams, Jr.	1, 2, 3	Ohio State	Ohio State	Florida
Harvey K. Meyer, Jr.	1	Florida	Ohio State	Florida
Roy F. Bergengren, Jr.	2, 3	Florida	Ohio State	Florida
George F. Henry	3	Florida	Ohio State	Colorado A&M
Talmadge B. Young	3	Florida	Ohio State	Berry College
R. Lee Hornbake	4	Ohio State	Columbia	Maryland
Donald P. Maley	4	Maryland	Ohio State	Maryland

Nominally, the profession had a yearbook program, but the aspiration of a series that would demonstrate the intellectual bona fides of industrial arts—or at least make the field, in Hornbake’s words, “well thought of”—had yet to be realized.

Yearbook Planning Committee(s): From Supervision to Franchising

Something had to be done about “the whole Yearbook situation,” Whitesel (1954b, p. 11) acknowledged in his report of the yearbook planning committee’s September 1954 emergency meeting. The five participants “decided to start by first developing a statement of principles governing all decisions in yearbook planning” (p. 11). Among these was a reaffirmation of the privilege and intent of the ACIATE’s officers to name the “special committee” responsible for each yearbook. Another was to clarify the role of the membership. Whitesel (1954b) wrote,

A yearbook session will be held at the convention next spring [1955] at which time the entire membership will participate in suggesting and discussing various topics as possibilities for future yearbooks. (p. 11)

The ACIATE leadership appears to have hoped to accomplish two goals, involving the general membership in yearbook decisionmaking and addressing the shortage of agreeable topics for future volumes. Open sessions of the yearbook planning committee were held on the first full day of the AIAA conferences in 1955 and 1956. The following year Hornbake noted that

The Yearbook Committee ... has proposed a series of publications through the ninth yearbook and the several editors have been designated. At the last two national conventions a prospectus for each forthcoming yearbook has been presented to and discussed by the Council members. (1957, p. iv)

As Fuzak noted in his November 1960 letter to Maley, efforts like these did not increase the active participation of ACIATE members in selecting yearbook topics. In any event, these open sessions ended in 1956. In their place, Stephens and McKnight began hosting a breakfast meeting for the yearbook planning committee. To keep costs reasonable, admission was “by invitation only.” Whether intentionally or not, the officers of McKnight & McKnight, who had persuaded the ACIATE to institute a permanent yearbook committee, now cemented another brick in the wall separating the ACIATE membership from yearbook decision-making. After four years, the breakfast meeting was replaced by the dinner, mentioned earlier, that Stephens arranged in 1961. The practice of the publisher hosting such a dinner continued until 2008.

By the late 1950s, two factors were converging. The yearbook planning committee was encountering difficulty identifying topics it could pair with suitable editors, and the official channels through which an individual member could influence yearbook decisionmaking had been restricted to either presenting a formal proposal to the committee in a closed-door session or getting named to the committee (between 64% and 100% of these seats were held by people who had already contributed to a yearbook as a writer or editor). If there was a watershed moment, it was the committee’s acquiescence to Lux’s package proposal in 1960. In a sense, Lux became a franchisee of the committee.

Once institutionalized, the practice of approving package proposals would per se reduce the direct influence of the yearbook committee on the contents of yearbook chapters. Two reasons that this committee would voluntarily relinquish such control are apparent from the record. First, committee members—and especially Fuzak—were in a dilemma. On one hand, they were responsible for the council’s signature product; on the other, it had become difficult to organize and supervise editors and writing groups. This was partly because yearbook editorship, hamstrung as it was by this process, was often not sufficiently rewarding to those able to carry it out. The second reason was that, by attracting seasoned editors with the promise of more autonomy, the committee was able to surrender responsibility for each individual volume without abdicating its fundamental function to supervise the yearbook series.

The NSSE experienced a similar shift at the same time:

Many early NSSE Yearbooks were actually the result of committees created to study a particular issue; findings were then written up and published. … In 1963, the title “chairman” was replaced by “editor,” marking a shift in the organization of yearbook work away from committee-led efforts. In the 1970s, the yearbooks began to be organized more as a group of authors contributing chapters under the direction of an editor who tended to be recruited by a Board member. ( “The History,” n.d. )

For the ACIATE yearbook series, the emergence of the “strong editor” model was swift. The editors of at least four of the five volumes approved in 1961 appear to have been given as much latitude as Lux enjoyed. After that, yearbook topics were only rarely scheduled with unspecified editors; even in these cases, the editors, once chosen, were permitted to select their own authors and topic outlines.

Recapitulation

An inspection of the early yearbooks of the American Council on Industrial Arts Teacher Education reveals surprisingly few hallmarks of the series it would become a decade later. Whereas all but two yearbooks since 1958 have been edited collections of chapters, five of the first seven were reports of studies. For each volume from 1955 through 1961, the yearbook planning committee selected a topic and outlined a general approach before assigning an editor to carry out the plan. This is a very different system from the committee’s current consideration of package proposals.

Since the early 1960s, the yearbook series has been remarkably stable in terms of decision-making structure and the management and organization of individual volumes. How this tradition evolved from the initial conception of the series—in which the membership at large would determine the topics of books, which would be produced by committees answerable to the council as a whole—was the central question of this study. To Kinzy (1973) , the answer was relatively straightforward:

The yearbook series was a need felt by the profession and one of the main, if not the main, objectives of the Council when it was formed. It was made financially possible by a generous offer from McKnight & McKnight Publishing Company. It was made a reality by Walter R. Williams, Jr., who made the proposal to McKnight & McKnight and edited the first two yearbooks and provided for the stopgap third yearbook to keep the series going.

Problems of yearbook planning made evident by Yearbook 3 were solved when John A. Whitesel appointed a Yearbook Planning Committee and developed guidelines. The yearbook program has operated smoothly since that time. (p. 138-139)

Kinzy’s three primary sources for his history were Williams, Whitesel, and Hunt. Hunt wrote in 1960 that “the story of the origin and development of the ACIATE Yearbook program reads almost like a fairy tale” (p. 104). But a broader examination, albeit one without new interviews of these men, suggests otherwise. Whereas in a fairy tale the hero surmounts extraordinary challenges, the protagonists in this story battled institutional homeostasis, competing egos, and divergent management styles—formidable, but nonetheless ordinary, challenges. Kinzy’s characterization notwithstanding, these extended beyond the yearbook 3 problems, beyond the formation of the planning committee, and beyond the adoption of the first guidelines.

In fact, Whitesel’s institutionalization of a yearbook planning committee did not alter the “whole Yearbook situation”—at least at first. It did, however, signal the eventual demise of the concept wherein an active membership would select topics of yearbooks. The execution of each yearbook would be the responsibility of a special committee appointed by the council’s officers. Nonetheless, as Fuzak noted, the yearbook series could not be carried out solely by the planning committee itself.

A degree of stability was achieved by counterbalancing strong editors of individual volumes with a new model of the yearbook planning committee as an oversight or quality control board. With Maley’s successful maneuver to extend his term as committee chair, the transition to modern yearbook decisionmaking was complete.

Suggestions for Further Research

At least three approaches to the continuation of this research appear to be potentially fruitful.

Impacts of Inertia

How has the stasis described here impacted the yearbooks since the mid-1960s—and in turn, how has it affected the larger profession, both in and beyond the US? In his review of yearbook 44, Foundations of Technology Education , Petrina (1998) supports the premise that ideological homogeneity constrained yearbook decisionmaking, at least through the mid-1990s. Did the concentration of influence, which began in the 1960s, ultimately give control of the yearbook series to a handful of likeminded men who protected the yearbook series from competing ideologies? How has the yearbook-selection process, and the stability of that process, impacted the range of acceptable topics and authors?

Delayed Democracy

Once the ACIATE yearbook series was begun, democratic decision-making was sacrificed to promote efficiency and consistency. Perhaps this sacrifice was temporary, or, after 60 years, the yearbook decision-making structure has ceased to be an effective tool in promoting specific ideologies. Demographic changes in the profession, including the closure of once-dominant doctoral programs and an increase in the number of teacher educators whose professional preparation is in engineering or other fields, may have diluted the “old boy network,” resulting in yearbooks that better represent the profession.

Over the past two decades, more yearbook authors have been women, and more have held office in the National Association of Industrial and Technical Teacher Educators, a group sometimes viewed as a rival to the ACIATE. Of authors in higher education, fewer have been full professors. And the number of authors from outside the US is growing, though slowly. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that in any earlier 10-year stretch in the profession’s history, four yearbooks would appear with titles like Diversity in Technology Education ( Rider, 1998 ), Appropriate Technology for Sustainable Living ( Wicklein, 2001 ), Ethics for Citizenship in a Technological World ( Hill, 2004 ), and International Technology Teacher Education ( Williams, 2006 ). [Regarding the last title, it should be noted that C. Robert Hutchcroft advanced the first serious proposal for an “international” yearbook in 1959. Four years later Marshall L. Schmitt of the U.S. Office of Education unsuccessfully sought to have the yearbook committee consider a similar topic.]

Impacts of Individuals

This article discusses the influence of individuals, such as Walter R. Williams, Jr., Wesley D. Stephens, and William McKnight, Jr., on the yearbook series in its formative years. Further investigation should also focus on the longer-term impacts of Donald Maley on the yearbook series. In his term as chair of the yearbook planning committee, he exerted more influence over the series than anyone had before. It also appears that both directly and indirectly, Maley served to stabilize the series into the 1990s.

Including four years as chair, Maley’s yearbook-committee service totaled 16 years between 1959 and 1992. Two other committee members whose long service suggests that their influence should be studied are R. Thomas Wright (13 years between 1982 and 1995, including 8 years as committee chair) and G. Eugene Martin (20 years between 1981 and 2007).

Final Thoughts

To some degree, the ACIATE’s founders were unaware of the logistics of producing the kind of series they desired, and, at the same time, they seem to have overestimated their collective ability to manage the series without such a structure. It is well worth noting that they ultimately succeeded in their task of having a yearbook for their profession. But what of R. Lee Hornbake’s concern that his profession’s lack of respect was due to its lack of a yearbook? Morris Freedman, a former chair of the University of Maryland’s English department, who considered Hornbake to be “the spiritual creator of the University of Maryland,” remarked after Hornbake’s death in 2000: “I was stunned when I learned that his academic field had been industrial education. The obituary solved this mystery, reporting that he spent a year at Harvard studying the humanities” (p. B-8).

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Patrick Foster ( FosterP@mail.ccsu.edu ) is an Associate Professor in the Technology and Engineering Education Department at Central Connecticut State University.

References

Appendix: In Order of Appearance

Ralph Lee Hornbake (1912-2000): Received his doctorate from The Ohio State University, but appears to have had fundamental differences with AIAA founder and Ohio State Professor William E. Warner. After twelve years, he left the Industrial Education Department at the University of Maryland in 1957 to join the upper administration. The university’s Hornbake Library was named in his honor.

DeWitt Talmadge Hunt (1889-1988): As AIAA President, 1949-51, he headed the drive to create the ACIATE. In 1955, he retired after forty years at Oklahoma A&M College to become the Specialist for Industrial Arts for the U.S. Office of Education. He had begun his teaching career in 1908, before most of the other figures in this story were born, and received his doctorate at age 50.

Walter Rollin Williams , Jr. (1909-1989): The first President of the ACIATE, he was largely responsible for its constitution and for its first three yearbooks. Preceded Hunt as AIAA president. Left the University of Florida at the end of 1953 to become that state’s Director of Vocational Education. The son of Quaker missionaries, Williams spent most of his first fourteen years in China.

William Warren McKnight , Jr. (1913-2006): After World War II, he began to assume leadership of McKnight & McKnight Publishing, which his father had founded in 1895. On August 1, 1951, he agreed that McKnight & McKnight would underwrite the ACIATE yearbook series. He sold the company in 1983.

Wesley Delmar Stephens (1921-2009): William McKnight, Jr.’s “right-hand man,” he eventually became the company President of McKnight Publishing. He often acted as a liaison between the company and the ACIATE, at one point becoming the council’s parliamentarian. He remained active in the industrial-arts field for more than a decade after retiring in 1978.

John Allen Whitesel (1903-1993): Assigned in 1948 by the AIAA executive committee to organize the ACIATE, he called the May 10, 1950 meeting at which the council was formed. Whitesel, a Professor at Miami (Ohio) University from 1941, was the third president of the ACIATE and formed the first Yearbook Planning Committee in 1954.

John Alexander Fuzak (1914-2007): A graduate of the University of Illinois, Fuzak was ACIATE President from 1957-1960. Among his posts during 31 years at Michigan State University were Dean of Students and Vice-President for Student Affairs. In a brief professional baseball career, he batted .194 in 20 games for Class D Sioux Falls in 1936. He later served as the President of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).

Donald Maley (1918-1993): As the 1960-64 Chair of the ACIATE Yearbook Planning Committee, he oversaw the committee’s transition to its modern form. Like Hornbake, whom he replaced as department chair at Maryland in 1957, he was often philosophically at odds with Warner. Maley was originator of the influential Maryland Plan for junior high school industrial arts.