By Tommy Navickas
"In my view, almost everyone at Illinois State numbers among the oppressed. Yet, we don't self-identify as oppressed, and that is part of the problem. Sure, we may be much less oppressed than many others, but to the extent that we pay more in interest than we receive in interest over our lifetimes, we are oppressed. As such, our real interests lie not with the wealthy or powerful but in changing this condition of oppression, and we can only do that through identifying with the oppressed. If we do not understand our own oppression, we end up being part of the problem rather than part of the solution." — Lucille Eckrich, associate professor, Educational Administration and Foundations
(November 7, 2008) Lucille Eckrich defines much of her career as "grounded in a deep commitment to understanding the systemic and structural causes for oppression, injustice, and inequity." Her lifelong goal is to "help to overcome these causes, thereby creating the conditions of the possibility not only for public education, but for human flourishing too."
Eckrich says her career and life paths stem from the issues she became involved with in the 1970s as a high school student in suburban New York. During this decade, students like Eckrich became active in economic and environmental issues, such as the world food crisis, recycling, organized rallies, teach-ins, and long-term programs to address these eminent social justice, economic, and global concerns.
While Eckrich started out thinking she would major in sociology, her pursuits quickly morphed into a desire to study chemistry and biology as she became more concerned about underdevelopment and the world food crisis. Between her sophomore and junior years at the College of Wooster in Ohio, Eckrich participated in Operation Crossroads, a now 50-year old cross-cultural exchange program that takes racially mixed groups of North American students to Africa to live and work with African counterparts.
Placed primarily in The Gambia, Eckrich says, "I found out that people there definitely knew how to farm; their limitations were economic, not lack of technique." Her experiences in West Africa largely defined her undergraduate career as Eckrich designed her own major in Third World Development Studies, a combination of economics and African studies. After graduating and attending a summer seminar with Paulo Freire, who would also come to define her life-long career, Eckrich worked in Botswana for three years in an integrated rural development project and Setswana adult literacy program.
Eckrich then made the switch from rural and subsistence living in southern Africa to urban and under-resourced areas of Chicago, Illinois. Eckrich explains the program she became involved with as, "An urban education program that is experiential-based and uses the city as its classroom." Her work as assistant director and field instructor at the Urban Life Center took her and her students to neighborhoods throughout the city (most of them low-income) and helped Eckrich to realize how teaching in urban areas requires teachers who are not only well prepared content-wise and pedagogically, but who also have personal experience both outside and especially within the communities where they teach. Eckrich explains, "Such experience reveals who you are, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and what biases you have."
Eckrich's commitment to urban life was and still is motivated by the importance of social justice and experiential learning. After six years of teaching in Chicago, she returned to academe to supplement her rich teaching experiences. Eckrich received her Ed.M. in social foundations of education with specialization in sociology of education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992 and followed that with a Ph.D. in 1998 specializing in philosophy of education at the same university. Her dissertation is a study of "Value in Economics, Ethics, and Education." She was hired by Illinois State in 2001 and has used the teaching philosophy laid out in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire—which shaped her worldview in Botswana and Chicago—as a large influence in how she facilitates learning in her own classroom at Illinois State. Eckrich explained, "Freire criticizes what he calls the 'banking' approach to education—where instructors deposit knowledge and students give it back just as delivered. Freire and I argue a better process is 'problem posing.' That is, learning is better conducted as a dialogical process where everyone has a place at the table in making sense of the world, particularly in making sense of the contradictions within people's lived experiences."
Eckrich is now deeply involved in Illinois State's initiatives on behalf of urban teacher preparation (UTP) for Chicago and other urban communities throughout the state. She readily encourages her students, some of whom she advises in the recently formed student organization called UNITE, to get involved with the community. "Besides studying the history, listening to the music and learning the languages and cultures of your students to get a deeper knowledge of where they come from, you have to be familiar with their neighborhood—either by living there or through walking its streets, using its library, reading its newspapers, traveling on its buses, frequenting its enterprises, and eating in its restaurants," Eckrich commented. "This establishes the groundwork for eventually getting to know your students as individuals." In addition to including a four-day experiential learning trip to Chicago in her own teacher education courses since 2002, Eckrich helps to direct the Multicultural Mentorship Project and helped to spawn and administer a summer course development grant (as part of a federal Teacher Quality Enhancement grant awarded to the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline) to encourage other faculty to incorporate urban teacher preparation and field experiences into their syllabi as well.
In other scholarly pursuits, Eckrich serves as editor of Planning and Changing, an educational leadership and policy journal published by her department, and has sustained research rooted in her dissertation's critique of our monetary system. Eckrich explains, "Money itself is not the problem; rather the problem is the way it was institutionalized in interest-based savings and loans. The concept of taking interest from those who are most in need and giving it to those who already have more than they need is counter-productive." Her publications on the subject include a 2004 response to Raymond Callahan's 1962 classic, The Cult of Efficiency, entitled The Inefficiency of the "Cult of Efficiency": Implications for Public Schooling and Education (pdf). Eckrich's aspirations for expanding this research include implementing a county currency using public schools as the entry point. "It would be a local currency that school staff and vendors could accept and use as tender and then, at year's end, pay into property taxes."
As the unsustainability of our existing monetary system grows ever more apparent to her, Eckrich perseveres to examine and help eliminate inequalities at home and globally. Her work at Illinois State University reflects her belief in the possibility of informed, systemic change. Above all, Eckrich says she feels an ethical and civic duty to help her students to embrace and engage with diverse communities-in-need through a profound understanding of and deep commitment to the social foundations of public education.
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