Like a series of ripples radiating from a tossed pebble, Harry Daniels’ (PhD ’78) career path has moved from his graduate years at Iowa to distant shores of intellectual endeavor. And ever curious about the world around him, Daniels has spent his career tossing in new pebbles, delighting in each new pattern of ripples.
Building on experience as a high school counselor in Mason City, Iowa, and a junior high school teacher in Cedar Rapids, Daniels’ research interests focused on environmental influences on moral reasoning development in medical students.

Although the specific focus of his work shifted to other areas of inquiry, the Oelwein, Iowa, native says the broad intellectual perspective he acquired at The University of Iowa has been a continuing theme in his research. In particular, the professor and chair of counselor education at the University of Florida at Gainesville continues to be intrigued by the impact of social forces on individual behavior and attitudes.

“At Iowa, I learned many skills that I’ve applied again and again,” he said, “and I’ll never forget Professor Nick Colangelo saying, ‘Always remember to consider the possibilities.’ My training in critical thinking has allowed me to do just that.”

“Harry is an Iowa success story,” said Professor of Counselor Education David Jepsen. “He sampled widely from College of Education offerings, including work with the Iowa Testing Programs, and never saw his Ph.D. as a ‘terminal’ degree. He’s never stopped learning or applying what he’s learned.”

The challenge to consider the possibilities has spurred Daniels to become versed in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, and the sociology of families. An early interest in how people adapt to change—developed during his 18-year tenure as a professor of Educational Psychology and assistant dean of the Graduate School at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale—has played out through a number of research projects.

Daniels and his colleagues developed a curriculum and counseling model to help Illinois public school students—the workers and managers of the future—to positively address the issues of life change and adaptability. Then, he started learning about family therapy, which led him to wonder how families prepare children to cope with life’s ambiguities. And now, he’s become fascinated by the prospect of how families identify and track change through their use of metaphor. For instance, Daniels’ former SIU colleague Lyle White says, when a couple describes their relationship by saying, “We’re just not getting anywhere,” they are measuring the development of their relationship in metaphorical distances.

“Harry’s work has been invaluable in training therapists,” says White, SIU Professor and Chair of Educational Psychology and Special Education. “It helps them become sensitive to and curious about the language their clients use.” White adds that Daniels is an excellent mentor of young scholars and knows how to “apply the fundamentals in a thoughtful, not robotic way.”

“Education is a dynamic profession,” Daniel notes, “and as teachers and scholars, we are sometimes called upon to modify who we are. So, for instance, the process of developing a school program to help children cope with change led me to another fascinating area dealing with how families handle ambiguity and ultimately how language in the family affects children’s school performance.”

During the last three summers, Daniels has worked with a team of University of Florida colleagues and lab school reading teachers to help students entering middle school improve their reading performance.

“We look for the verbal strategies families employ to encourage or discourage reading as an active, positive behavior,” he said. “Parents and children talk separately and together, and it’s a real breakthrough for some parents to acknowledge that they—like their kids—use specific strategies to avoid doing things they just don’t like to do.”

Daniels’ peers understand and appreciate his intellectual roots. “Harry exhibits many fine qualities,” White says, “and certainly his University of Iowa experience provided the ‘nurture’ to what I believe was an excellent beginning by ‘nature.’”

In his own life, Daniels continues to welcome the very subject of change he studies and to relish the intellectual crosscurrents where disciplines intersect. –by Jean Florman