Abigail James: Continued Journey In Shaping The Minds of Students

There is no set way to learn. Each person has their own strengths and weaknesses but not every teacher knows how to teach students who do not think like them. Dr. Abigail James, professor of psychology at PVCC, has spent her life immersed in education in one way or another and is always working to teach so that any student can learn from her. She grew up at the Woodberry Forest School, a boys’ school where both her parents worked, and was educated at a girl’s school — St. Catherine’s School. James was left with a lasting impression of the differences between how boys and girls learn, which has driven her life-long investigation into the best ways to foster learning.

Despite her advanced age, James possesses a youthful vigor when teaching. She paces the front of her classroom as she lectures, returning to her desk only to move the slideshow forward. Her hair has yet to turn gray even after her 75 years of life, and she has started to dye it gray instead. Although she still uses slideshows she created years ago, James augments her lectures with personal anecdotes and updates on new research. To James, her knowledge of psychology is more than the information she is sharing; it defines how she teaches.

In 1970, James received a Bachelor of Arts degree in science education from Duke University. Afterward, she taught science courses at many different institutions, including the boys’ school where she grew up while continuing to take classes on education. In these classes, she noticed something. “I began to realize that a lot of my professors, who were experts in education, didn’t understand that not everybody learns the way they learned,” said James. “And I thought, okay, so then that means that if you don’t learn the way the teacher learns, why are you there?”

This understanding led her to pursue a Ph.D. in educational psychology at the University of Virginia, where she majored in educating boys — a subject for which there was very little research. She incorporated what she learned into how she taught, organizing her classes and her tests so that they were accessible to people who learn differently from the average student. Her knowledge of psychology is always at the forefront of her mind when she is teaching. “To me,” James said. “Teaching is a thoughtful operation. I do things very deliberately in the classroom.”

James takes into account a wide variety of differences when teaching. These range from how different genders approach learning, to how learning differences impact how students handle knowledge and tests. She has published books on these topics and continues to research and write. Before 2020, she traveled around the world, going to conferences and boys’ schools to share her understanding of how teaching can be molded to support all kinds of learning. More recently, she spoke at a Virginia Community College conference on how to make classrooms more accessible. Currently, she is working on her next book and is teaching Developmental Psychology (PSY 230) at PVCC, and she shows no signs of slowing down.