Dr. Bob Spires, an Associate Professor of Graduate Education at the University of Richmond, brings a wealth of experience from his background in both K-12 teaching and higher education. With a deep understanding of the challenges facing education today, Dr. Spires is committed to promoting critical thinking and social justice within the educational system.
Drawing on his experiences as a former K-12 teacher, Dr. Spires recognizes the vital role of education in fostering democracy and addressing social justice issues. He acknowledges the complexities of the modern world, where students are inundated with information and faced with navigating an increasingly complex society. In response, Dr. Spires emphasizes the importance of teachers who can encourage critical thinking and engage students in meaningful dialogue about societal challenges.
Dr. Spires advocates for a shift away from viewing K-12 education as merely a training program for industrial workers. Instead, he champions the development of teachers who are passionate about their subjects, connect classroom lessons to real-world issues, and foster compassion for their students. He believes that education should empower students to think deeply and critically about the world around them, rather than simply memorizing facts and figures.
As both an academic and a practitioner, Dr. Spires emphasizes the importance of collaboration and team-building among colleagues. He believes that meaningful change in education can only occur through collaborative efforts within schools, universities, and the broader community.
Having witnessed firsthand the economic and social challenges faced by working-class families, Dr. Spires is deeply committed to addressing the disparities in education. He understands the impact that poverty and standardized testing can have on marginalized children and advocates for educational systems that are meaningful and relevant to all students.
In his role as an educator and researcher, Dr. Spires is dedicated to practicing what he teaches and making a positive impact on the lives of students and families. He remains steadfast in his belief that education has the power to transform lives and communities, despite the challenges and constraints faced by the educational system.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Dr. Bob Spires:
Describe your background and what did you do before you joined the company?
During my graduate studies which I completed while teaching public middle school, I conducted research on the experiences of Mexican immigrant families in the Southeastern United States, and learned about the exploitation that migrant families faced. During the research for my PhD dissertation, I had the opportunity to travel to Thailand for the summer and collaborate with NGOs, government officials and activists who were a part of the anti-human trafficking movement. From that point on, I began first-hand collaboration with grassroots anti-trafficking and humanitarian nonprofits that used education to address some of the world’s most pressing problems such as child exploitation, extreme poverty and hunger, and more. I continue collaborating with a number of organizations including serving on the board of directors of LWB, an international charity with programs in China, Cambodia, India, Uganda and Guatemala, as well as Highland Support Partners, an international charity with programs in the US and Guatemala.
What are your responsibilities as Associate Professor of the company? What is the happiest part of your daily routine?
My work with nonprofits and my work as a teacher and a teacher educator have led me to believe that our society needs a major shift on all levels if we are going to be able to navigate the next few decades of converging crises from the environmental to the economic. No longer does the fanaticism of neoliberal capitalism hold the imaginations of the general public across the world. From the more rapidly occurring economic crises we continue to face regularly to the environmental collapse we are seeing in many key places on the planet, to the increasing number of conflict and environmental refugees on the move, we cannot continue to rely on the status quo. We have seen that austerity measures of the World Bank and IMF have crippled the Global South but cutting any semblance of social safety net for their most disadvantaged, to the exploitation of Global North corporations of the resources and people of the formerly colonized parts of the planet, to the financialization of international trade which equates to a type of casino capitalism, we are heading for disaster on every level. Nonprofits cannot be the stopgap measure for these issues as the structures and systems creating these social issues expand recklessly and at the majority of the world populations’ expense. Education can help, but not alone, as we encourage the next generation to think differently about their community, their society and the world’s pressing problems. However educators know all too well that there is an outright war on education as a social good, and the privatization of all public education is the ultimate goal of both sides of our very narrow political spectrum in the United States.
Which are the major services of the company and how do the company to get ahead in the competition? What value-added services does the company provide?
Innovation is key to making positive change in the world, but this concept is easily co-opted and derailed from its original intent. In today’s fast-paced profit-driven society, innovation has become a place holder for fast profit, not systemic change. I believe we need to go in the opposite direction when we think of innovation, whether in the for- or non-profit world. We must return to a communitarian view of our society, with all of us interconnected. We must recognize the environmental and social costs of all of the products and services we provide and recognize that just because something is cheap to make today, doesn’t mean we aren’t off-loading the cost onto the next generation. I want to emphasize that we must rethink how we balance individualism with communitarian values. We do not need to fully eschew our individual talents and tastes in order to think about our place in community and society, and how to lift others in our community up as we also work toward our own needs and dreams. Today’s companies, universities and even k-12 schools emphasize the individual hero as the penultimate icon. While young people should be aware of the amazing accomplishments of important people of the past, they should also be taught to recognize the importance of those icon’s family, community and society, and how they are ultimately inseparable from the individual efforts.
What drew me to the University of Richmond’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies was the organization’s commitment to building up community members’ in terms of both their careers and their impact on their own communities. I teach mainly in a Masters of Teaching program that prepares bachelor’s holders to become licensed teachers in Virginia as well as holders of a graduate degree. This program helps to bridge the gap for schools in Virginia that are in dire need of effective teachers, but also provides an affordable and personable graduate education experience for our students who appreciate small class sizes, personal mentorship from professors and integration into the local k-12 education community. Although we are embedded within a national liberal arts university, or unique mission serves a number of purposes including community engagement, serving non-traditional students, and providing educational opportunities that bridge theory and practice.
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
In terms of leadership, I have similar advice that I give to k-12 students as well as graduate students and future leaders. The first piece is to question everything, especially the status quo. There are likely important reasons why certain practices become common sense but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t regularly question why we do what we do. We may find that a particular practice in an organization served a very time-specific function but its usefulness and applicability to a changing landscape has run its course. Be willing to question first, and then make a change if you find that something isn’t working. That can be very difficult, particularly if status quo practices benefit a specific person or contingent in an organization but don’t actually benefit the overall purpose or mission of the organization and its stake holders. The next piece is to recognize that all organizations are local in many respects. All organizations have actual human beings locally situated within a very specific context and therefore, all organizations impact local communities in varying ways.
When organizations begin to think about their local impact, even when they are national or international in scale, they are forced to think beyond the overly simplistic tools of cost-benefit analysis and toward a more nuanced and relational impact that they have at many scales. While the shareholder interests may be important to a corporation, we now see just how damaging the myopic approach that many firms have taken up can be on actual communities and people and environments. Finally, I recommend that future leaders consider a shift from transactional ways of doing business toward more relational ones. In the age of the fly-by-night startup, we must do better about shifting our entire organizational, social, political and economic cultures toward authentic connections with each other, from the mailroom and custodial services to the executive suite.
