When you walk into the Lucy Brock Child Development Laboratory Program the first thing you’re likely to hear are the children playing in their classrooms down the hall to the right, assuming it’s not naptime. The next thing to strike you, once again assuming that you show up at the right time, is the smell of the children’s lunch coming from the kitchen. As you head down the hall towards these and examine all the art on the walls, you should also notice a door, almost always open for everyone to come in, be they toddlers or graduate students, and talk to Dr. Andrea Anderson, or Mrs. Andrea if you’re one of her smaller students.
Dr. Anderson is the program’s director. She was first introduced to the Lucy Brock Program while she herself was a college student attending App, and her time there shaped the course of the rest of her life. “I took a class at App, and part of the lab component was to be over at LB (Lucy Brock), and I just fell in love with it. I saw teaching young children in a different way than I thought and it just clicked for me there.”
A college education wasn’t always a certainty for Dr. Anderson, but it was always her goal. The daughter of a poor rural family, she’s a first generation college student. “Both of my parents just went through high school, actually they both went straight to factory jobs, and I think they realized they didn’t want that for me”. Though she chose App State for financial reasons, since she is a lifetime resident of Watauga County and her home being only a short drive away from Boone, she quickly fell in love with the university and its staff.
After finishing her undergraduate degree, Dr. Anderson took a break from school and worked a number of jobs in child development, including the Children’s Council and a preschool, until 2003 when she decided to go back to get her masters degree. Between her undergrad and her masters, she met and married her husband Patrick, and shortly after returning to school she found out she was pregnant with her son.
Delayed by her pregnancy, Dr. Anderson decided to resume her education in late 2005, but struggled after being out of school for so long. “Because I had been out of school for ten years, I had to learn everything again,” she said, but added that motherhood gave her some advantages in her chosen field of early childhood education, “I was able to talk about life experiences in a way that other students weren’t.”
She graduated with her masters degree in 2010, and would find herself at Lucy Brock again in 2011, this time as its new Director. While working at Lucy Brock, Dr. Anderson has been able to fully develop her outlook on education. She believes that the best way to educate children is to make them as involved in their own learning as the teachers. “I am a fierce advocate that learners are equal partners in the educative process. So as a teacher it's my job to have an idea about where we’re going, but giving learners a say about how we get there.”
After a few years at Lucy Brock, she decided to take her education to the next level, and enroll in the doctoral program. That time was especially hard for her. Her mother’s health began to worsen, and more family issues began to present themselves, but she forged on, completing her dissertation and defending it in early 2020, becoming a doctor only a week before the first Covid 19 lockdowns went into effect.
Though robbed of her original graduation, Dr. Anderson did her best to remain positive throughout the pandemic, taking on the very difficult task of reopening a safe school for toddlers. The pandemic was difficult for Lucy Brock, but they finally landed on a working system. The university planned new graduation ceremonies, and by the end of the year things were beginning to look hopeful again, but Dr. Anderson suffered the greatest hardship of all just 3 days before it was over, her mother died of complications related to Covid-19.
That loss made graduation difficult for her. Her biggest cheerleader and best support wouldn’t be there to see it, but the College of Education scheduled her hooding ceremony, a ritual where a new doctor is given a hood to wear with their gown, and she was chosen to speak.
“It felt good. It was bittersweet, because all my family couldn’t be there, especially momma. It was a ritual that was worth going through to say that yes I did this, I made it,” she said. “Those ceremonies, those rituals give you credibility, because yes you did this, and that was good because Covid took some of that away.”
Dr. Andrea Anderson has accomplished a lot in her life, and been through a lot of hardships to get there. She has raised a family, revitalized an educational program, and gotten a doctorate degree in a field she is incredibly passionate about. She has a lot of advice to give, but I’ll leave you with just one piece that she gave me. “The experience is the thing, and if you're not willing to experience it you aren’t going to learn from it. When you're afraid to take those risks, you miss out on a lot of opportunities.”
Written by: Jackson Anderson
Photo courtesy of Dr. Andrea Anderson
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