COMMON PURPOSE
Passion for literacy unites
educators across time and place
STORY AND PHOTOS BY BETH GOINS
Not many children ask for a projector as a birthday
gift, but Taylor Patrick did. She knew she wanted
to be a teacher, and her bedroom was her first
classroom, where she practiced her future profession
with a row of stuffed animals as her first pupils.
Her mother, grandparents, aunt and other family
members were teachers who instilled in Patrick a
deep love for education. As an honor roll student at
Lakota East High School, about 20 minutes north of
the bustling Midwestern city of Cincinnati, Patrick
seized an opportunity to do an independent study,
working with local second graders. From there,
Patrick’s trajectory as an elementary school teacher
was set. Or so she thought.
Pause the story there and rewind a couple of
decades earlier, when Joan Gipe was on a similar
path. By then, she was an up-and-coming graduate
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student at the University of Kentucky. Having earned
her bachelor of arts degree in elementary education
at the UK College of Education, Gipe was pursuing a
master of arts in elementary education and reading.
As Patrick would do years later, Gipe had practiced
teaching with her toys and younger siblings as a
child at home in Louisville. However, her life’s work
wouldn’t become clear to her until years later, when
she began working with an illiterate boy as part of
her reading clinic course in her graduate program.
Once a week for an entire semester, the boy’s
parents drove him from Lawrenceburg, Ky., to
Lexington to meet with Gipe, who used the language
experience method to involve the boy in decoding
words by reading transcriptions of the stories he told
to Gipe. “I still remember those stories,” Gipe said.
“They were about a pet rabbit. We wrote about his