Guiding teachers guiding students: the birth of homeroom and historical questions of teacher autonomy

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1930s schooling in the United States underwent fundamental transformations, ultimately responding to the profound social, economic, and technological changes taking place in the early decades of the twentieth century. Students’ social and emotional health needed support, especially for entry into a rapidly changing nation and world. One addition from this period, though, has not received much historical and scholarly attention: homeroom. School administrators and educational scholars in this period created homeroom as a means for teachers to foster stronger relationships with students to better guide pupils’ personal, social, academic, and vocational futures. Explaining how teaching homeroom was an “art” that also involved some “magic”, homeroom’s proponents appeared to leave teachers to their own inspiration and intuition in guiding their students. The actions of homeroom’s proponents contradicted their idealistic tones though, as they supplied teachers with detailed lesson plans, assignments, discussion questions, and student data-collection forms, prescribing clearly how teachers were to conduct the homeroom period. Telling the origin story of homeroom in the USA, then, offers a clearer understanding to educational historians of the complexities, challenges, and often contradictions of the professional transformation into what Kate Rousmaniere deems “the teacher as social worker”.