From ABC to Ph.D.

“I helped you through first grade, you helped me through my doctorate,” Darlene Bricker said to Dr. Donald Wattam, a faculty member on her doctoral committee, after receiving her Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) with a specialization in Teacher Leadership at commencement in July 2008.

Bricker’s committee chair, Dr. Christina Dawson, had recommended a committee that included Wattam, who, like Bricker, was from Montana. What Dawson didn’t realize at the time was that Bricker, in her first year of teaching, had been Wattam’s first-grade teacher at Devlin Elementary School in Havre, Mont.

Although Bricker and Wattam each realized their prior connection as soon as Dawson made the suggestion, neither made reference to it throughout the entire time they interacted. “Of course I remembered that he was my student,” Bricker says, “but I thought that, to be professional, I wouldn’t say anything.”

Wattam, who says he had followed the career of his former teacher over the years, was similarly reticent, and it was only after Bricker received her diploma that they discussed the amazing coincidence.

“After commencement, when we were having our picture taken, I said to him, ‘You must have had an excellent first-grade teacher,’” recounts Bricker. “It was so wonderful to see him again and to see him be a successful doctor in his field. It’s a heartwarming feeling to know that in some small way, [I] probably did make a difference.”

As for Wattam, the commencement ceremony “was truly one of my proudest moments in my academic career,” he says. “It was a full circle moment.”