Jean Moule Oral History Interview, May 8, 2012



[JM] My name is Jean Moule. It is May 8th 2012. I am sitting in my study surrounded by memories and lots and lots of books and articles from my time at OSU which is the subject of today’s interview.

[NF] So what brought you to OSU? What about OSU and specifically the program interested you?

[JM] Well you know I finished the last interview surrounded by the albums and the pictures from our family and talked about the church in our home and my volunteer work and education up until then. Here I was, home, family, lots of experience with education and then Oregon State University. We had a third set 00:01:00of families living with us with young children. Perhaps I needed an excuse to move away from those pressures and embrace the academic world. I had already expanded my physical capacity by joining ski patrol, participating in Masters Track and Field and running a marathon. What about my brain?

[NF] Do you recall any preconceived notions about OSU or the town of Corvallis before you came?

[JM] Well, I considered OSU a “cow town,” holding little intellectual light and diverse community surroundings that would suit me compared to University of Oregon, the Berkeley of the North, and the site of my master’s degree. And part of the answer about why I came to OSU was that a colleague in Talented and Gifted Education from U of O urged me to apply to the doctoral program in teacher leadership. She had already set up an appointment for me to meet the 00:02:00director and his assistant for lunch. And I had all of three days to complete the application. What did I have to lose? Lots. At the time I thought I would just be a PhD student for the rest of my life. I remember going to my application interview with my leg in a cast from my severed achilles tendon from the last day of my ski patrol candidate year (there went forever my marathon-level training). I remember Bonnie Morihara, a doctoral student herself, bustling into the room full of cheer and welcome. Little did I know that our paths would connect so completely and that she would become my best friend. I came to OSU because I was recruited. I stayed because I felt I was needed. Knowing Corvallis better did not change my mind about its makeup. I believe my initial thoughts about the students and the faculty, land grant, 00:03:00mostly rural students and unexamined liberal faculty, stayed about the same. I was just more vulnerable to these realities as I became a student and then a professor.

[NF] Were you actively involved in campus activities and groups as a student?

[JM] As a graduate student, I was active in the Black Graduate Student Association. I remember meeting some wonderful people at these events and feeling that some of my concerns about OSU were shared. One comment will live in my memory. A woman said, “Many universities have a low level of expectations for black students. OSU has a low expectation for black students and those students believe it.” I would say that my son and daughter-in-law who both entered the PhD program briefly saw that very quickly and they got out. Most 00:04:00people of African descent in Oregon are used to working in environments where they may be the sole person of color. But there was something about the overwhelming and acceptance of whiteness and white norms in Corvallis that was very difficult and there was no easy way to find a black peer group.

Fortunately for me, I was quickly introduced to “Pearls of Wisdom” a Black women’s group in the Corvallis community. There were a few Black students and faculty in this group, most were community members. I became friends with the prominent organizer of this group and stayed often in her home while I was a student. My friend/colleague Bonnie and I would work out in Dixon, mostly swimming in adjacent lanes and discussing our work. During this time I also competed in an OSU sprint (meaning short) triathlon (I will do my second and last in a few days, May 19, 2012).

[NF] Were there any incidents or controversies on campus that occurred in relation to multicultural issues? Do you recall the mass walkout of the mid 1990s?

[JM] Well, in the student boycott in1996, I relished walking with thousands during that time. I actually wrote about it in an article that I have. I said, “In February 1996, the increasing incidents of verbal and written racial slurs on campus alarm some people. At this time, the African American student population of Oregon State University was about 160 students or 1.2 percent. The turning point in campus and community passivity came after students on a dormitory balcony verbally harassed and attempted to urinate on an African 00:06:00American student. This incident resulted in a campus wide boycott of classes, a march, and a rally. At least 2,000 students and community members participated in these events. The students who accosted the African American student were arrested.” Having been arrested in the Free Speech Movement and doing a regular solo picket of Planned Parenthood, I had experience taking a stand against the grain or participating in civil disobedience. It was one of the times I probably felt most integrated on campus! I have a photo of my walking with colleagues and my son, Michael, who happened to be on campus that day.

[NF] So do you recall your feelings or specific experiences regarding how you were treated on campus?

[JM] A few other overtly racist incidences do come to my mind, but the covert ones were much, much worse. For the openly racist ones, I recalled being called the “n” word from a car driving by in front of Education Hall. I remember a time of discrimination regarding a test; this was when I was a graduate student. I had given the same answer as a friend, yet somehow received a lower grade. Judy and I enjoyed each other’s company, as we were the oldest two people in our cohort. She was so much fun. However, something in our relationship was not quite right and I understood it later when I read one of her regular columns in the Barometer, the campus newspaper: She had had maids living in her home when she was growing up. Needless to add, they were black. So I think that having me as a black colleague may have brought up some of those feelings for her. But we 00:08:00were close and we were close enough to share our midterm grades and papers, the tests, that day in a difficult statistics course. (By the way, I could never have earned a doctorate if there was still a foreign language requirement). Anyway, she had a B on the test and I had a C. We carefully examined our papers and saw that our answers and work on one we had missed [received partial credit] were nearly identical. When I made an appointment and shared this with the professor, he quickly changed my grade. I believe I said to him that after I graduated we would be colleagues and I would like our relationship to begin on a better basis. Um, I entered OSU as an expert in talented and gifted education. I will pause in my story to read a list of some of my connections and service from my Current Vita.

I was a leader in many professional organizations both before I got to OSU and when I was at OSU. I particularly remember being invited by Susan Castillo, state superintendent of public instruction, to be a member of the professional educator advisory team and went to Salem once a quarter for those. As an active member in the Oregon chapter of NAME (National Association for Multicultural Education), I was a conference chair in 2005. And the organization went underground for a few years and I helped bring it back to the surface with some colleagues at OSU and also at other universities in Oregon.

I helped do the bias review for the Oregon Educator License Assessments. I was invited at a seminar on cultural competency in Oregon. I did planning for the 00:10:00Oregon Association for Teacher Education meeting…I know I’m missing a lot. But I worked outside of the campus quite a bit. And of course did reviewing for two of the very popular books in my field, Multicultural Education by Jim Banks and another by Valerie Pang and of course review manuscripts for a number of journals, the Journal of Teacher Education, Excellence in Education, Teacher Education Quarterly, Urban Education, Teacher Education and Practice, and the Journal of Negro Education. And besides speaking of course and taking care of my own classes, I spoke at Corbin College, I presented at Middle Schools, and presented at Lane Community College and through all this I was serving as a 00:11:00volunteer ski patroller. Interestingly, the awards I have gotten have been through that event for saving a life on the patrol. I’ll get to some of the other things as I go over.

But I did want to get a few specifics from my curriculum, from my CV. My first idea when I got to OSU for a dissertation was how people move from novice to expert. I was not involved in multicultural education at all. I was going to use my own journey from getting my first llama to selling the llamas and I was learning and being interviewed on how to use llamas as guards for sheep. I even spoke to someone in animal sciences in preparation for this work. I saw this movement from novice to expert as a key part of education and thought this would be fun.

And, during, my first year at OSU I took a course in teaching. I recently found the folder that talked about this. I used this image for this class, this prototype class, a tree. And I saw the roots in it as being the environment, social, the dialogue between people, and wanted to base education for students on this growth model. So here I have this land based coming in, living in a clearing in the woods and having llamas. And I get to OSU and what happens? I was very quickly asked to intern in the course Multicultural Issues in 00:13:00Education. Now, I had never taken a course myself in that area and had zero background or knowledge in it. Quite obviously, I was asked to teach it because I was of African descent. At one point I asked an administrator that point blank. I still can’t believe how he squirmed before reluctantly saying “yes.” My mentor and major professor, Warren Suzuki, now deceased after retiring to his birthplace, Hawaii, supported me in my efforts to learn about this field. He was a wonderful mentor as he was so much a guide on the side. My first mentor at OSU had left for a year and I am very glad she did. She was a sage on the stage. I remember I worked with her on a paper and she took me through nine revisions. Surely one can convey all that is needed in one or two sessions. Eight is just cruel…. I was never that bad of a writer.

Back to the course though, my first experience with this course was a two and a half week summer session. And Warren and I, he pretty much gave me freedom of it, helped me out when I had questions, but he left me on my own to figure out this new material. I very quickly refused to do a class of that nature in such a short time because it was just too much to process.

[NF] So actually I wanted to go back to a couple of things that you talked about earlier. In relation to the boycott that you participated in, I’m interested to hear your thoughts on your role in this protest considering that you were such an active protestor in your undergrad years, in the sixties, and now 00:15:00decades later, you decided to participate in this walkout. Did your thoughts change? Decades later, I remember you talking about in an earlier interview how you sort of felt that the activism of the sixties that you felt like you were one person out of many and it wasn’t quite making the difference you wanted. Did that change years later? Did you feel that boycott made a difference?

[JM] Oh, at OSU? Like I said, it was one of the first times that I felt like this is what you’re supposed to do, you’re to act when you feel strongly on what was happening. And it was nice to see people on the campus getting up and moving. I mean, I still will get up and go for myself to move, but by becoming a professor, I was in a position of influence in teaching my students. And 00:16:00that’s why I thought why being part of the protest was a nice reflection back on my earlier times. I think that in some ways for me it confirmed to me that I needed to work against the grain in my teaching. And as far as the campus thing….it seems like it cyclical, I don’t know…I think as I’m going to get to later, I think that what happens in a lot of situations like this, you have those kind of activism and people start talking how they want to make a difference because they want to see this kind of thing happen again, but then they sort of slide back and things go back into this unconscious bias and unintentional racism, which is where my work is right now.

[NF] So, actually, since you mentioned at the time of the walkout, you were a professor already in 1996?

[JM] No, I was still a student.

[NF] So at that time you were still a student. So can you talk a little about your transition from student to professor? What were the dates that you were in the program and then what year did you become a professor and how did that transition come about?

[JM] Okay well, I entered OSU as a student in fall 1995. I defended my dissertation in December 1997. This is a very quick transition. Now of course, for education, you enter with your master’s degree which is a lot of coursework. And my husband, not myself, figured out very early that I was a “grow your own” candidate. OSU had so much trouble attracting and keeping minority faculty that the school of education recruited myself and a Latino to 00:18:00enter the doctoral program, graduate, and hopefully join the faculty. Now, I can say with confidence that this is a bad idea. No matter how much faculty thinks differently, an individual moving from student to faculty will be at a disadvantage from respect versus one found through search. Lots of people on OSU’s faculty received their PhDs from OSU. However, they went somewhere else for a couple of years before returning to OSU. However, I was place-bound on a four-acre property an hour from campus. I had no intentions of moving out into a wider academic world once I graduated, though I did consider Willamette so close to home. But by then, I so loved research that an institution that did not have that focus had less appeal to me. And, besides, I didn’t complete my application there.

Phone Rings

My sense from several faculty members at the school of education was that graduate students were simply “lower class” and what you did before you entered the program was not well- respected. It could be that I was drawn into my field because of the rotten attitudes I sensed. Was it because I was a student that I was treated differently or because I was black? Actually, sometimes I think it was because I was a Christian. Unbelievably, I had two professors on my first day in their class make a comment about how they had trouble working with Christians or something like that.

One of the stories that happened that first year: I was in a class where a teacher showed us a film of a gay/lesbian group on Harvard campus that was confronting with a conservative Christian group on Harvard campus. And I remember looking at the pictures; one group, the conservative Christians are all white males [laughs] and the gay/lesbian group is nicely diverse with females in it. And just looking at the two groups, which one was I attracted to.

But I remember the instructor who later became a colleague said, “If you can’t talk about these differences now, in graduate school, when can you talk about them?” So we were silent, we weren’t ready to jump into it… and finally I got brave enough. And the next week, this is what I said in class, I 00:21:00said, “Billy Graham was in town last week and someone asked him whether homosexuality was a sin. And Billy Graham said ‘Homosexuality is one of many sins, the greatest of which is self righteousness.’” Now, that quote says to me, that someone who would judge people is much more at fault than what they would be judging about. But the people in the class didn’t hear that. They said, outside of the class, “Jean says homosexuality is a sin.” That was repeated at a faculty meeting and the rhetoric in the meeting, which I heard 00:22:00from three different people, was that someone said that hiring me, having me go from doctoral student to faculty, because of that quote unquote statement quote would be the same as hiring a racist. That was the statement they made. And over the next two years, I had coffee or lunch with at least three people who were in that faculty meeting because they wanted to know, they wanted to ask me that. And, first of all, I repeated it, and I said, “The point of that quote is that you’re not to judge people. And all you’re taking is the first part of that…and not only that, I was quoting him! And I was trying to get people to a higher view and you’re bringing it down to that level?” And this is how I 00:23:00explained it, I said, “I believe that sexual relationships are best expressed in marriage. I had twenty-something year old kids who are not married and they are having sex.

Now, do I love them? Yes, I love them.” So my statement has nothing to do with how I would love someone. I’m only called to love people, I’m not called to judge people. So why should that quote say anything to you about how I would treat students? In fact, if you look at Jesus’ walk on this earth, he loved people more if he thought they were in need of love. And so, if anything, if you do decide I do have that bias, I’m going to love my gay/lesbian students who come into my room more because I would think that they would need it more. I 00:24:00don’t think that the people who I shared it with ever got that. And I think that was, to this day, one of the harshest things, for me, about being at OSU, is that once people put you in a box, there’s nothing you can say, there’s nothing you can do, and never ever was there a time that I was told that I treated someone badly because quote unquote I thought they weren’t doing what I thought they ought to do morally, so that was pretty darn painful.

Now, to enter a doctoral program of three years minimum intense work an hour’s drive from my home was quite a radical choice at age 49. The doors were opening and I had quite a bit of peace. But there was a piece that was spiritually 00:25:00connected that I’d like to share. First of all, we had this church in our home and we have a full gospel, you know sometimes you get dreams and visions and you share them. And for a full year before I went to OSU, there was this one section in Ephesians that’s called “putting on God’s armor to resist the enemy when he attacks and when it’s all over you’ll be standing up.” And for a year, I would get incredible stories or insights into each piece of this armor of God. And I would share with people, and it was, let’s see, “put on a belt of truth, put on a breastplate or righteousness, work shoes that can speed you 00:26:00to preach good news, have a shield of faith to keep the arrows from getting at you, have on a helmet of salvation and a sword, which is the Word of God, the truth about His love.” So, it wasn’t until I got to OSU that I realized that I was being armored for the front line. And that all that year of preparation, to a large point…as I said the very first day, when I was in class and someone says…some Christians have difficulty with my teaching…and I’m going, “Why should that come up on the first level?” But the very first outcome for the PhD program said something to the effect was that being in the program, you 00:27:00would transcend your personal belief system. Why that would be the very first thing listed in a PhD program still escapes me completely. I don’t get.

But, as you might have guessed, there were times, especially during those first couple of months, where I questioned this choice, and finally… I’m not the kind of person that asks for signs…but in my prayers, I was getting to the point where I needed just a little more support. So, I just said, “Lord, I’ve gotta have something.” I was on campus and I was just getting ready to do a presentation and I had lots and lots of props and I was going up and down from my car upstairs and one time as a I was headed back downstairs towards my car, I looked toward the recycling area. And, by the way, one time they were 00:28:00getting rid of hundreds of file folders. They were just trashing them, and I still have a foot stack at home that I reuse, so I’m always going to be looking over to recycle, and there was this sign, a piece of board with its back towards me, and I went over and I picked up the sign [laughs] and I picked it up and the sign said, “School of Education.” And, you understand, when you ask the Lord for a sign, you not asking for a literal sign. I got a literal sign and I picked it up and this thought came through my head that was, “I’ve given you the school of education.” Now, I gotta tell you, when you hear something like that, your feet get a little shaky. You try to take a deep breath and you try to stand where you are. And I shook my head and went on. And I did not pay 00:29:00very much attention to that. But, when I look back at my time at the school of education, there are a few things that happened that I still can’t believe happened. As a doctoral student, as an assistant professor there were times when I had a larger role then you would ever expect.

And I’m going to end this session with reading the time that I gave the commencement address. So, assistant professor is asked to give a commencement address to the graduate students and their parents. I mean, that’s an incredible role, to walk into graduation right behind the university president. And I just shake my head, I mean, why, how did I get there? Some of the other 00:30:00things that happened is that I was asked to be part of the redesign committee led by George Copa for our school when we were redesigned and then Tim White asked me to be on the selection committee for the Dean of the College. We’ve got another Dean and a full professor and me and those two positions were very formative in the school/college of education, so they sort of fit in with the sign thing that I got. My challenges, I believe, often pushed the college to more cultural competence in general. And, eventually, my sad time through the P 00:31:00and T process, which I’ll talk to you about, made its way about to Sabah and Ed Ray and influenced not only my college but other colleges. And then, this is really funny, you realized that the year that I left, the school of education, the building itself was gutted [laughs]. Now, again, I’m just taking a step back…you can make anything that you want of it. I always felt both humbled and very inadequate for the role, that that sign pertained. I also know that because of the sign and because of my specific feelings that I was to be at OSU, I didn’t leave it lightly, I left when my husband retired. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.

[NF] So, now that you, when you became a professor, can you talk about what kinds of courses you taught? And, if you had control over the content of your courses? And can you specifically talk about Multicultural Issues in Education and Multicultural Issues in Educational Settings? And based on your work with your students, did you course content change over time? And if so, how? And also, what did you learn from your students?

[JM] Teaching a course in a field new to me was a challenge. I used a basic book by James Banks at first and I quickly began to draw in speakers. One of the ones was Susan from Sesame Street… Dr. Loretta Long. I brought her to campus…I was still a student when I did this actually, because remember I started 00:33:00teaching this class while I was a student and just moved onto it. So, for myself, when I look back at the course, I don’t remember going from graduate student to professor in that course, because that course just kept on going, so it really wasn’t a very strong change for it. But I brought people in…Dr. Loretta Long, James Loewen, and panels in my class. When I needed help in my classes, I really enjoyed working with Wayne Haverson. He is a kind, thoughtful man. He thought that I was exposing myself too much in some of my work. Yet I felt that unless I shared my heart and was authentic, how could I ask students to be? Over time I came to see that our main text needed to be more Oregon based (Oregon’s a predominately white state) and it needed to include the 00:34:00psychological journey of taking the course. And then the opportunity to write opened up for me, I’ll talk about that a little later.

During this time I first interned and then taught alone ED 313: Trends and Issues in Education. The overlap of material was great, about the only thing that I covered in this one and not in multicultural issues was school reform. I headed up ED 309 for a couple of years. That was the course for school placements and got me out into most of the schools in Corvallis. So I was able to see those schools first hand. One story that I think about that affected how I saw myself in the university and the community and also how others saw me was I had my interns that I was supervising spread over many schools and then I was 00:35:00going to schools with this packet for putting undergraduate students into schools for a bit of time. And I remember once going into this school and there was no one in the front office so I went to the front desk, I signed myself in, I got the visitor badge, and then I started to walk to the room where my student was. And it was clear that people were alarmed. They weren’t use to having anyone brown in the building. And it could’ve just been surprise, but it was very, very uncomfortable. So I remember asking later my colleagues, “Could I please have all my supervisees in one or two buildings?” So I could get a relationship going with the school and not have to do this gauntlet of “yes, I’m from the university and yes, I’m safe.” I mean, it was just hard work that I didn’t think was necessary. I think that was one of those teeny tiny things where people were saying, “Well why are we doing something special for 00:36:00Jean.” Not realizing, that they don’t get, they’ll never get what it’s like to walk into a school in Corvallis when there’s no one else brown in the school. I get that and others often didn’t.

As I taught my classes at OSU, especially Multicultural Issues, I found myself moving more and more into racial identity development, because the earlier I put it in class, the easier it was for students to hang in there. And let me tell you a bit more about that particular thing. My daughter Mary was home for the summer of 1997 from her time at Cornell where she was working on her Masters in Africana studies. While she was there, before she came here, I attended the course she was a graduate assistant in, one by William Cross, Jr., who is the 00:37:00originator of Nigrescence and a very important man in Racial Identity Development. I met Bill then and he has touched my life several times and I actually interview him in my textbook. So I asked her to teach my class about his racial identity theory. And it’s probably listening to my daughter teach about it was when I personally got it. Now the original theory has several long terms like “pseudo-independent” and autonomy and some complex definitions. But, over time, I came up with what I call a simplistic “racial interaction theory.”

I’m going to start by quoting Robert Sternberg. He said, “Being creative 00:38:00involves a willingness to step outside the boxes that we and others have created for ourselves.” And as I’ve taught Multicultural Issues in Education and I’ve realized its a process course, my students need to understand this process, so they’ll hang in there. So I call Stage One “I’m okay, you’re okay.” And this corresponds to the pre-encounter stage in racial identity development theories. The second stage I call, “Something is not okay.” This corresponds to the encounter stage found in most theories. The third, I call, “I’m not so sure about you,” in this stage I summarize several different stages from different theorists including Anger, Denial, like, “I’m okay, 00:39:00you’re not Black enough” “I’m okay, you’re not”…things like that….pseudo-independence/emersion. Depending on the group I’m working with and their interests, I expanded final stage using details from various identity development models. And the last stage, I call “I’m okay, you’re okay, we’re okay.” This stage is equivalent to the autonomy or independent stage where people are willing to work for change in a more integrative manner. So when students understand that they’re going to go through “a something is not okay phase,” pretty early in my class, then they take a deep breath and hang in there a little longer. So that’s why I had to move that little closer to the beginning of my class. They would stay both literally and figuratively with me.

I want to go back just a little bit…I didn’t say anything about my time at OSU as a student with my son. I actually taught my son Matt in his first class at OSU. I shared the class with a co- teacher, which was good, so I didn’t have to grade him. It was a real thrill to have my son there that year and I’m sure that having my son on campus, a tall, fair, strong male. There were several times that we hung around together and I think that helped me see OSU as a safer place. I wanted to bring that up because I think that’s key. In this article called “Mom, Son, Graduate College Together” I decided earlier that getting a doctorate was a very self-centered activity because it focuses on research, 00:41:00writing, and dissertation and it doesn’t go well with raising a family, which is why I waited until I did to go back. I’d been asked years before but I waited. What was really nice was that my husband was agreeable to my plans, he did most of the cooking. While I went to Corvallis a couple of times for a week, and it’s something that I wanted to do for a long time, and I said at this point that I don’t think a person’s ever too old to keep on learning. And one month after entering the program, I celebrated my 50th birthday by jumping out of an airplane. They were both in the same ball park: lifelong dreams that you don’t know what you’re getting into until you get into it. I actually wrote an article called, “How is jumping out of an airplane like doing a PhD program?” [laughs]

My…little bit more of history…when I finished my doctorate, and people in my committee said “congratulations, Dr. Moule” it was so amazing because Dr. Moule to me is my husband’s father and after he died, his wife gave us his doctoral robe, which I wore at my own graduation and I’m going to attend the commencement this year, and it’ll be my last commencement I hope….Michelle Obama is going to be the speaker….and then I’m shipping the robe to my daughter who will then use it as she presides as the chair of the board of trustees for Voorhees College in South Carolina, where my father attended. And, again, a little bit more [laughs]. After my children went off to college, I was 00:43:00sorta semi- retired. I was writing stories, raising llamas, just kind of enjoying myself. Then a phone call from a friend suggested that I go back and get my doctorate. I just kind of humored her saying that I thought it was a good idea while not seriously considering it. It’s almost a fluke, I hadn’t planned on doing this, but once I started, I worked as a graduate assistant, which paid for my courses. As Mark Twain so aptly put it, “I’m glad that I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I will never have to do it again.” That’s what I wrote in my dissertation as well.

As I said, I stayed in Corvallis, starting as a graduate student, for about three nights a week. As I was getting ready for this interview, I ran across a 00:44:00piece, a set of emails that I wrote back and forth with my first major professor and it showed what my schedule was like. This was actually in the year 2000. I said, “My basic schedule is three contiguous days on campus of face-to-face classes, advising, planning, meetings, etc. One and half days for email, calls, and web course from home. Half a day for writing, until week five when I do a concentrate week in prep for AERA.” I always liked to go to AERA because there are folks of color there. I went to AERA, the American Educational Research Association conference almost my entire time at OSU. In fact, I just got back this, two weeks ago from going to the one in Vancouver, British Columbia. But this one sentence, I read this and I reread it, “I’m under a great deal of pressure right now, so just take the lead,” this is in a shared course, 00:45:00“I’ll help and get more involved as I get my other three classes off the ground.” So I had a very, very busy load. And by commuting to Corvallis and staying in Corvallis, it saved me a two hour commute every day that I stayed over, but, it’s helped me to forge me a few friends and I attended a few evening events, but in general because of that, not living in Corvallis, I never felt as actively involved as a student or faculty member. So, I do think that the distance played a key, but I believe race was a bigger key [to my sense of isolation].

And there’s a story here that I’d like to have collaborated or refuted, so you can listen. In 1996, while a doctoral student, I applied for and received a graduate student stipend to attend AERA in Chicago. After I did, then the 00:46:00director gave me a bit of support money as well. I was invited to share a room with a professor, too. While there I attended a film called “Shattering the Silences: Minority Faculty Break into the Ivory Tower.” When I returned to campus I was determined to share this film with black faculty and professional faculty on campus. I arranged for the room and the film and got a list of the black folk on campus. We viewed the film in December 1996. Unbeknownst to me, following and because of the catalyst of the film, the faculty began to meet on a regular basis beginning in January. As far as I know, this was the beginning of AFAPC. Also, as far as I know, no one connects my showing of the film to the subsequent meetings! I did work with a small committee that included Angelo Gomez and we cut the film down from 90 minutes to 45 minutes. Tim White’s 00:47:00college was the only one to fully embrace this film and show it to everyone possible, even closing some offices to allow for a joint viewing. I was part of the small group debriefs that happened after this film. And, years later, in our own college our faculty viewed this or one of two other films as the yearly opening event.

I’d like to… there are several threads going through this interview and I know I keep bouncing around a bit. But there’s one little piece from my journey that I’d like to share. This is when I was doing the library paper for my dissertation. In one point, in the video tape of my presentation, I stand with my hands on the table in front of me, with my head hanging down, documenting my frustration with trying to answer the third challenge from this 00:48:00faculty member. I felt that she was questioning not only my analysis, but my very being. Strangers viewing the tape marveled at that faculty members are allowed to verbally accost doctoral students in such a manner. Such questioning, if ever appropriate, is usually reserved for the closed part of an oral exam or doctoral defense. At a certain point, this probing seemed to pass the line into racism; let me explain. This faculty member’s insistence on only a Euro-centric perspective may have evidenced an institutional bias. It’s been argued that whites consider an idea authoritative when it’s been published, where folks of color, particularly blacks, consider it important for individuals to have personal positions on issues and to assume full responsibility for arguing as such.

I was determined to include my personal position and include my current life context, but the faculty member wanted only hard objective facts. There are some researchers that assert that claiming objectivity is itself the bias stance of privileged, white males. In her zeal to discredit my inclusion of additional criteria of my work…for instance, I decided it was important to include the race of the researcher in the studies, so I would include that when reviewing and analyzing. She was blind to the strength of my objective analysis and she missed my efforts to bridge paradigms. Other participants found my standard analysis to be clear and complete. And I think this is a really clear example of how the work of a black faculty member, having to do both the standards being 00:50:00held by the institution that she’s in and a standard that she can personally live with, makes the job a lot more difficult - excuse me I’m going to be a little bit out of the order.

All right. We are a little bit more, my son Matt and I completed…He completed his masters degree the same day that I completed my PhD and the picture of our celebration is quite amazing. We have… in that picture…We have my family, we have my son Matt graduating, myself graduating. We have my husband, showing his wallet open [empty!], because in the picture we also have my son Michael and his wife, who have just been married, and they’re kissing each other [laughs] and 00:51:00then we have my daughter Mary and her fiancée, who are about to get married. And this whole event is on June 14, which is our wedding anniversary, and it’s also Fathers Day. So, that all happened in one day. What a kick! That was June 14, 1998. Okay, so let’s focus a little bit on the Immersion Program.

[NF] The Master of Arts … the program that you initiated, correct? Teaching 21st Century Education?

[JM] Yeah [pause, papers rustling] I’m going to start talking about what it 00:52:00was like to get this grant out of the blue. It all started because I was just sitting alone at my desk and this RFP came over my desk and I applied for it. And then I got it.

[NF] RFP, did you say?

[JM] Yes, that’s the word for when you put in for a proposal to get funding. So, I managed it, and the first thing I had to do was, an Eisenhower professional development grant, the very first thing I had to do was to find a school to do this. What happened was the Immersion Program placed in Portland and Salem was based on this Eisenhower grant that provided the MAT Program 00:53:00before the immersion program with money to take all the students in the MAT Program that was based in Corvallis to Portland for three weeks. And they were living in a dorm; we had the money to support them in a dorm and to feed them. And, in the end, I ended up giving classes for the people in the schools, so it was just an amazing, amazing, a real highlight of my time at OSU, to be able to take our students to a diverse setting. ‘Cause my feeling was the distance of Oregon State from these areas of rich cultural diversity makes it difficult for pre- service students to work with more than a few isolated students of color in local schools. And many of those students in Corvallis are assimilated into the communities. So, how was I going to find a school?

I called the first school. I started by looking in a database of schools in Oregon that included an ethnic makeup and highlighted every school in Portland with a minority population of 80% or more. I also found a database that had the race of the teachers. I felt it would be best if they were in a place where they had mentors of color. So the first school I called, they said “no.” We’re being reconstituted, we don’t think it’s a good year to have guests. A bit disappointed and not willing to face another “no” response over the telephone, I decided to find placements through direct new personal contacts. I showed up at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary school cold. “Is the principal in?” I asked. “No,” replied the secretary Claudia. “Would you like to speak to the Vice-Principal?” “Oh yes.” I waited. To my surprise and disbelief, I know this woman. She and I had worked together on the Talented and 00:55:00Gifted circuit years before. Her name, Joy, expresses my emotions. I pleaded, I explained, I became excited. The principal returned and Joy introduced me. Joseph Malone is the best principal I have ever worked with. One intern described him this way: “The principal of King plays a very active role in the culture of the school. He has a very dynamic personality. I have noticed that he often interacts with students more than I have seen other principals. He makes a concerted effort to connect with the students.

I’ve observed him on the playground, in the halls, and at lunchtimes. He works the lunch line due to underfunding. He has the respect of teachers, who I have heard acknowledge his flexibility and contribution to the school. I feel the principal of King is a great gift to the school, the students, and the teachers.” I remember watching him serving lunch and calling the children “doctor” as he serves them. And the difficulty of finding him at his office? 00:56:00He’s always with children in classrooms. One time a policeman stopped by the school at three AM because there was a light on and he was working. This man is amazing and he trusted me. I remember also I watched the day the governor visited his school with an entourage and a pack of legislators. Many saw Malone as the chief guide of the visitors. I was one of the few who saw him an hour earlier in rubber gloves, checking each restroom for cleanliness in the building. It’s just a wonderful, old polished stately building and I’d work there for years.

At our first meeting, Malone said that the mentors would have to be volunteers. There was a staff meeting that day. I walk into the school and he tells me that I can go the staff meeting that afternoon. I have nothing with me. No 00:57:00preparation. I held my breath and I asked to be allowed to share my vision with the teachers that day, and he agreed. At the meeting, I had only my ideas and my enthusiasm, but I found an ally. Lolita Darby, her gray hair framing her face, her warm voice promising both strength and care, sat on the edge of the crowd. It’s a crowd to me, for the school had 800 students and 35 staff members, miles and hues in skin color from Corvallis. I am energized. I drink in the diversity, the myriad colors. I feel as if I have returned to the school of my childhood. Lolita, bless her soul because she’s gone now, catches the vision. She sees it, feels it and reflects it. She volunteers on the spot. I’d 00:58:00envisioned older teachers, particularly teachers of color, passing the torch to a new generation. Eventually, I write an article on the importance of African American mentor teachers that is published in the Journal of Negro Education and that came out of research in this setting. But Lolita buys this vision, no, she invents it, for I had little idea what it could be. Eleven days later, Lolita and another teacher, Gloria, drive all the way down to Corvallis to help with the workshop to get our students ready to go up there. And by the end of that day, Lolita has chosen her two mentees for when we’re going to go up to campus.

There’s so much more here. I don’t want to read too much, but I think it’s 00:59:00important for us to understand this Immersion Program with the students changes, even a half day, a day, changes how people feel. Even incoming, pre-service teachers feel about working with a diversity population. Jen said, “I hope to gain satisfaction of connecting with the child.” In the first week, she reports feeling overwhelmed, scared, and apprehensive. During her first week onsite, she meets one-on-one with an OSU faculty member whose specialty is mathematics. Lolita calms her, suggesting she works for the kids and with them. 01:00:00Miss Jennifer adds, because Lolita calls all of the student teachers “Miss” or “Mrs.” or “Mr.” she becomes more comfortable with the mathematic subject matter. She also bonds with the students and becomes immersed in the classroom culture: “Each day, I’m getting more attached to the kids I mentor. They are so willing to share so many things about their personal lives. They’re so inviting and compassionate about people. I feel that the culture is family oriented and they really watch out for each other. The language and lingo is great to hear. Sometimes it confuses me, but one way that I know that I’m included is when they share with me what certain terms and phrases mean. It’s one way that they invite me in.”

Jen talks about how Lolita knows so many of the parents, grandparents, and 01:01:00extended family of the students. In many cases, she’s had the parents as students, now she has their children as students. She also notices that the African American students will talk about their affiliation not only with friends and family, but also knowing the Lord, they talk about their religion, or not their religion, their faith. “There’s not a fear stigma of acceptance on talking about the Lord in my class, it’s a subject of great value and great identity. I’ve also noticed the strong affiliation with the fashion scene.” And Jennifer talks about how Lolita walks the talk. And she, at the end, talks about a student that she relates to on a one to one basis. She sees this young 01:02:00student say to her, “I’m going to miss you, Miss Jen. Can we keep in touch?” And, as they’re walking out of the car, a younger girl says “Hi Niesha,” “I don’t even know that little girl” [answers the 5th grader] Jen says, “That’s when I explained to her that she’s a fifth grader, and younger kids look up to her at all times. She needs to be a good example for them.” She said, ‘Do you think she looks up to me like I look up to you, Miss Jen?’ This was one of those moments when I felt needed and it just reinforced my desire to be a teacher.”

So this is where she connected to one student. And one last thing, as she came back to Corvallis, “I miss the diversity, energy, spirit, and overall feeling of MLK. My mom felt it right away when she walked into the door on Friday and 01:03:00said, ‘I can understand why you don’t want to leave.’ She said she did not know what she was expecting, but it was nothing like what she experienced. I had been trying to explain to her for three weeks. She said that it was one of the neatest places that she had ever visited. I was so glad that she was able to come. Unless you’ve been there, it’s hard to describe to an outsider.” That’s just a little bit about the strength of the Immersion Program both the short three weeks, and the year-long one that I eventually put together about why it is so important to do that.

[NF] Has that program continued? Is it still in existence?

[JM] It lasted for one year after I left. It grew out of some of what was going on at OSU. A lot of it was the things that were happening to me and the MAT program before the Immersion Program. I remember this one particular incidence. We were reviewing applications and, as we were reviewing applications, I had in my hand, the student we were interviewing, and I realized that we had rejected the file of an African American who had applied for the program for exactly the same thing that was wrong with this student’s file. But this student was in for an interview and the other one had been rejected. And I do not anger easily and people have never seen me angry. I get frustrated and I raise my voice, 01:05:00“Oh Please!” I plead with people, my voice raises. But when I get angry, I leave. And in that instant, I was in the middle of the interview, I recognized what had happened. I mean, because I’m alone out here. And having some black students in the program is going to help me as well as everyone else in the program to have some diversity. I got up in the interview and I walked out. And I slumped against the wall.

It’s one of about two or three times in my life that I actually saw red. It’s been said that you “see red” when you get angry. I saw red. I was so 01:06:00angry. I can’t tell you how angry I was. It was a clear case, just as clear as a bell, and I then moved to redo the application process so it was fairer and it was consistent. That was part of the reason for that. And I served the MAT program before the Immersion Program started. And I think that was part of why I felt the need to get the Immersion Program going. Because you have to live in these settings to really get some of this. The difference in black and white communication styles is very real in the terms of a little more exuberance and a little higher voice and if you don’t get that that’s a communication style and you hear it, you think it’s because someone’s angry, and it’s not. And 01:07:00unless one has more experiences like that, they don’t get it. So that was one of the, I don’t know if you call it institutional or faculty biases that I was coming up against all the time.

I came to dislike my one-time-mentor because of her unchanging perspective and always “being right” including feeling that as a white Hispanic, she knew racism, which of course, in many ways, she did not. Her disrespect for me was incredible at points. I stopped going into her office because I realized I would leave with stuff to do with her or stuff she thought I should do. It was a case of once a student, always a student for her, for me, going from student to 01:08:00faculty, perhaps. I do believe she is a very large part of why I did not successfully get promotion when I went up for tenure. She is a very good example of “the well-intentioned still being racist.” She epitomizes for me one of the most racist statements someone can make, it was that she said to me that “something has nothing to do with race.”

This is a prime example of a white person stating that a black person’s experience is not valid unless they see it and they validate it. In other words, as a black person, unless you see my experience and agree that I’ve experienced this and see it, then it doesn’t exist. And, at one level, that is 01:09:00the most racist thing that someone can say is “Has nothing to do with race.” Because how would they know? There are some things that may not, that objectively are not, you know. And one of the things, honestly, there were several times when I was at OSU that I would just get home so exhausted. I would have to wait in the car outside and just take a deep breath. And sometime I would have to decompress my first morning back, just to deal with all the things that were going on. And there were a couple times when I would just shake my head and I was beginning to feel so beat down and so marginalized that I had to remember that I scored really, really high on objective tests and that I’m really very bright and intelligent. And I think that’s amazing that I would have to get to that point because of some of the disrespect. The same person that I’m talking about, often expressed somehow [regarding] the car trip from Corvallis to Portland for placement.

And that this was more dangerous than the car trip from Portland to Corvallis and back. I kid you not. I remember a day when we had finally gathered to discuss some important details of giving our students experiences in Portland and she spent most of our valuable time talking about how we should not have them travel that dangerous route. She even said, in a meeting, that if there was an accident, that I would be responsible. Yet she would freely ask for both my and others (usually minorities, if based in Portland) to make extra trips to OSU, over these dangerous roads, to serve some purpose she saw. But again, it is just really hard to reveal that or to show that to someone.

I was quite surprised when our elementary unit saw my efforts to have our 01:11:00students experience diversity in actual settings as somehow serving myself. Well, yes, I am Black and there are more people of color in Portland. But as I said before, I knew no one in Portland, I didn’t know Portland. I went there because there were students of color there. We found a school in Salem that was a dual language immersion program. And later, for the MAT program, we had half our students there and half our students in Portland for the three week placement that predated the Immersion Program. We had all of our students for three weeks in Portland, so there’s a little bit of a difference there. Yet, we said we wanted to do this, to give people diversity. Often at OSU I saw quite a bit of rhetoric about diversity, yet walls and obstacles about anything that moved us in that direction that took extra work. I often felt that I was the 01:12:00only one ready to put my time, passion, and, more importantly, my research and writing on the line to reach our stated goals.

One of the simple ones was, you know, I said, we have the applications and then we have some interviews. Why should we have our students come to OSU? Why don’t we hold the interviews for the program in Portland and in Salem? So we just drive and we interview everyone there that lives there. And I remember no one wanted to do it. It’s like “oh break with tradition; too much work!” But, I’m going, well if you mean it, that you want to recruit a diverse population. Why wouldn’t you go and interview in a place that’s more familiar, and easier, and connected for those students? Why make them come here?

And eventually, in the Immersion Program, when I had more control of that, 01:13:00that’s what we did. We held the interviews and not only that, we had them work in the school for the whole day and interviewed them while they’re in school. So they knew the schools that they’d probably be in. And there were some students, after they were in the school for the day, and had the interview, withdraw their application because they decided that this isn’t what I wanted to do, and that was fine. But the reality of it was there. At the same time, there are people in the schools who see…and I’ll read you one student reflection on that…as one of the most important experiences of their lives and it was really amazing what happened.

I’d like to quote from this, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. This was in an article I wrote called “Social Justice: High Road to Action? Or Low Road to Salving Your Conscience?” which is what I felt a lot of faculty at OSU were doing; fine with it until it takes work. Martin said: I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth… We need to create the kind of tension in society that will help people to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that 01:15:00over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. As a parenthesis here, I would call that my liberal white colleagues. He says, King says: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action."… Shallow understanding from people of good 01:16:00will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. Now, I do believe that several faculty members at OSU finally got it, but at what a cost for me.

There’s a scene from Lee Mun Wah’s movie Last Chance for Eden and it’s the first time I saw it illustrate in a way that I went, “Ah, now I get it!” So, this Native American is talking about how a group of girls that she knew played basketball with another group of girls and they won. And the coach of the losing team said that the girls had to be taken into the bathroom to prove that they were girls, because they won. And the woman, Native American who’s sharing 01:17:00this, you can see that she’s starting to get a little trembly and nervous and Lee Mun Wah stops, appreciates that story, and then he says, “ I want you to tell me how you feel.” And then she really starts to cry. And then she says, “I share that story. I go through that pain again.” And Lee Mun Wah sees that pain and starts again. She starts to cry and she says, “I go through that story just so some white person can get it just a little.”

And that’s how I feel a lot about my time at OSU. That there’d be these times when I share my heart and soul, I do my writing, or I get in a meeting and 01:18:00I bring this to the table and my chair, and I get nods all around the table. And then I was left in an emotional mess sometime. But after ten or twelve years, some people got it [laughs]. But at what a cost to me. I guess I would like to tell a little more about the work of the program. The amount of work it took. And then I would like to talk a little more about my teaching. Okay?

I headed up this list and I’m actually going to read the whole thing:

1. Preparation

Professional Program Lead Job Description

a. Create/update program handbooks

b. Schedule for year, update as necessary, submit to the Department Chair for each upcoming academic year.

c. Solve program problems at whole level.

2. Administrative and Legal Requirements

a. Attend meetings as is appropriate (Licensure Coordinators, department)

b. Maintain licensure paper work progress (fingerprints, checklists, forms)

c. Liaison with accreditation,

d. Prepare reports for consortium, accreditation

e. Comply with TSPC, NCATE, and CACR requirements and keep up with the changes as posted on the websites.

f. Comply with Graduate School and Registrar: petitions, policies, etc.

3. Communication

a. Handle queries by phone, email, and forward to appropriate person(s)

b. Create and update COEd Program website each term

c. Maintain complete program or study courses on each website

d. Post schedules for courses for each year on the website

e. Create/ maintain Listservs

f. Create/Maintain program blackboard site

g. Communicate with partner schools (calendars, site maps, staff list)

h. Communicate with cooperating teacher supervisors

i. Scheduling meeting locations and times (1-3 times a year)

ii. Inform and remind of meetings

iii. Collect items and set agenda

iv. Arrange for refreshments

v. Collect green sheets, attendance

vi. Distribute forms for observation

vii. Collect and distribute cooperating teacher/supervisor evaluations

i. Plan program orientation

j. Distribute and collect information on cohort (intake forms, info lists)

k. Inform all of registration information and problem solve

4. Staffing

a. Hire advisors and supervisors (locate, support and arrange pay)

b. Courses

i. Schedule (rooms, E-Classes, track course scheduling)

ii. Help part time faculty (recruitment, review resumes, interviews, decisions, orientation)

iii. Mentor part time faculty

5. Advising (both as program lead and major advisor)

a. Phone calls, emails, face to face solving problems

b. Ensure Licensure (first and second authorization forms and plans)

c. Advise degree candidates

i. Prepare draft degree

ii. Individualize

iii. Shepherd through signatures

d. Help with exit, transfer students

e. Placement issues

i. Video tape permission forms

ii. Observation forms

iii. Problem solve

f. Plans of assistance

g. Letters of recommendation

h. Oral exams

i. Schedule times for exams

ii. Schedule and set up rooms

iii. Help find committee members

iv. Aid students on portfolio

v. Meet grad school requirements

i. Manage work sample processes appropriate

6. Application/Admissions process

a. Review process annually (revise application process, set process, application packet)

b. Recruit (advertise, visit schools, make calls, follow contacts)

c. Establish file reviews (three people, set dates, procedures, complete missing coursework sheets)

d. Conduct interviews (schedule regular and late interviews, arrange for interviewers and interview questions)

e. Decide on admissions

f. Draft letters of acceptance and rejection

g. Provide scholarship information and recommendations.

7. Program completion.

a. Collect paperwork, maintain files

b. Ensure licensure

c. Plan certification and celebration

d. Follow up with students on strengths and weaknesses of the program

In our unit, you got no FTE for running a program, program lead. It was considered….You still taught your two classes, you still had your research and scholarship, you still had service, and then you had this. So, I guess you can see why I needed to retire. I think I was just plain overworked. It was pretty amazing. Okay, I’d like to go back to my teaching a little bit, okay? One of 01:23:00the stories I often tell on the first day of my classes is how I want to relate to students, how I want them to have a safe place, and I tell them a story. One of the assignments, so that I can get to know the students very well, is an intake form and their journal entries. So they probably have three or four per class, over the quarter. And, both on the intake form and the journal entries, I tell them that, unless they tell me not to, I may read excerpts from it to the class [always anonymously].

Well, this one time, I read a journal entry from a student who was an incredible writer. And I guess I should describe her as being raised on a ranch in central Oregon. She wore cowboy boots and a belt buckle and sometimes she wore a hat, I don’t know. But you could tell that she was a ranch gal. And there was another guy in the class who dressed similarly and they bonded. So, they often sat together in the back of the room. But she’s an exceptional writer, and one day, I’m standing in front of the class, and I read her journal entries, about what happened when she married an African American man, and how when her boss found out that she was married to an African American, she was fired. They were living together…I guess she had an apartment and they married and they lived 01:25:00in the apartment she had and her landlord threw them out. They walked down the streets of San Francisco and a bunch of guys started beating up her husband and hitting on her…it was very… and she wrote very well, just incredibly moving stories. So I’m sitting up in the front of the room, and I’m reading these journal entries, anonymously to the whole class. In the back of the room, she’s sitting, next to this guy, he doesn’t know who it is, he leans over to her and says to her, “That’s what she gets for marrying a black man.” And 01:26:00she starts to cry, and she gets up and walks to the front of the room, and she says, “That was my story.” And that was the best case I’ve ever seen of a wakeup call for that student, who happened to live, by the way, a few miles from where we’re sitting…I actually knew him. He went [prior to] undergraduate years to a place where I had taught. So I knew this student. And he spent the rest of the quarter trying to apologize to me, apologize to her. But it was that racial identity development. Something is not okay. Suddenly his racism is revealed.

And here’s another one that I like to share:

“Since the beginning of this class, a situation I encountered recently has continually been popping into my mind. I figure that this situation has been surfacing for a reason. So, I decided that this class presents a good opportunity for me to discuss it. Throughout the past two years, I have baby sat for a young girl on a regular basis. Throughout this time, we have shared a lot 01:27:00of quality time together. I feel that I have played a fairly significant role in her first three years of life. About six months ago, I was watching her on a beautiful sunny day. I asked her if she would like to go outside and play. She looked at me very seriously and replied, ‘No.’ I thought that this was unusual so I asked her why she didn’t want to play outside. She responded by saying, ‘I don’t want to play out there when it’s sunny because I’m afraid my skin will turn dark like yours.’ She continued on and explained to me that she wants to keep her light, white skin and she’s afraid if she goes outside on a sunny day, she will become dark. She says she does not think that dark skin is pretty like her white skin. I have to say that I was pretty taken back by the fact that this child was only three years old. And she was expressing this concern to me. I know her parents very well and they both value diversity and show respect for individual differences.

I was struggling to decipher just what this child’s words meant and how I 01:28:00should respond to her. I could not believe that at such a young age, this child had somehow developed the notion that a dark skin tone was not as pretty as a light skin tone. I bring this situation up, mainly, because I want to talk about how I felt when she talked like this. I’ve a very olive tone complexioned,” this student is white, by the way, “and in the summer, my skin gets fairly dark. I have noticed that I began to become very defensive when she talked in this way. In a sense, I became offended. She continued to state her concern about going outside in the summer sun because she did not want to get dark like myself. I decided that I should talk to her about how everyone has different skin tones and that no one color is better than the next. I explained to her that even her skin tone was slightly different than her mother’s and brothers. I told her that I thought that my skin tone as well as hers was beautiful in 01:29:00many ways. I would like to hear your response to this particular situation, specifically, I want to know if you feel this young child was actually forming these biases that a parent should be concerned about, or if you think this was just common curiosity. I would also like to know how you would respond to a young girl’s comments such as these. Also, I would like to start to discover why I felt hurt and defensive when she was talking about my skin color in the manner she did. What do you think about all this?”

[my written response to student] “First, studies have shown that children in the U.S.A develop the value of sense of skin color by about age 3 or 4 regardless of parental effort or color. Our cultural racism is just that deep and unconscious. Isn’t that just incredibly sad?” And I have to add the 01:30:00story at this point that’s not related to my response. But I’d like to add this story about a little white child in an upper class neighborhood with her mother in a grocery store. And, as she’s walking around the grocery store, she sees a little Latina individual. She goes up to her mother, at age four, she pulls on her mother’s skirt and she says to her mother, “Look Mom, a baby maid.” So, yeah, that’s our subtle racism. Back to what I told my student in class. “Second, I think that you gave an admirable answer. You might to carefully select a few children’s books with protagonists of color to give to her. As to your own defensiveness, I figure how my father must’ve felt when I, age five, wished I had blond hair and blue eyes. Our hope our sessions on Racial Identity Development will help you make meaning of your feelings.”

Okay…One other thing I often do in class, besides having people journal and respond to them. On the first day, I like to show an eleven minute film, “The Lunch Date,” and I discuss their answers the second day. And they write their responses to it anonymously, so when I read them anonymously the next week, I don’t know who they are, but they know if they wrote it. And what happens is that film, because of the students’ responses, reveals the racism of the undergraduates in my room very quickly. And it makes them pay very close attention, especially the ones who are caught in it. They can’t believe they were caught so easily.

[NF] Would you tell us a little about it?

[JM] The film? Sure. It’s an eleven minute film and you have a woman in Grand 01:32:00Central Station in New York City. She’s running to get her train. She runs into a black man with a briefcase. He tries to help her, pick up her stuff in her purse. She misses her train, she goes to get a salad. She gets the salad, sits down, goes back to get the fork and when she comes back, supposedly, there’s a black man eating her salad. Now…he says, “Get out of here,” which you can hardly hear. And she says, “You’re eating my salad!” And finally, he’s eating, she starts eating the salad with him. At one point, the music changes, and he gets her a cup of coffee and brings it back. And that’s why it’s called a lunch date. And then she looks at her watch, she’s missing her time, and she runs to her train. And she realizes that she left her bag at a 01:33:00booth. And she comes back to the booth, and you see her walking back and forth because her bag’s gone, and it’s at that moment that she realizes that her salad and bag were at a table beyond the booth of the man whose salad she ate, okay. She ate the wrong salad. She laughs. Maybe she gets it. And there’s lots of other details. And the problem with this film is that I’ll have students, after they’ve seen it, say right to me, “I’m really mad at that film maker, where all the bums were black and all the blacks were bums.” They’ll tell me something like that. Yet, in the film, there’s a black man with a brief case, there’s a man who bought his own salad and buys her coffee. And 01:34:00yet, their eyes are so focused on a stereotype of black, that they see it when it’s not there. And so that film really opens up a lot of eyes…it’s on YouTube. You just YouTube “The Lunch Date” and you can see it. Of course, now you know the trick ending [laughs].

Anyway, I love to use that one. I keep a warm fuzzy file, in which I drop notes, emails, cards that warm my soul, and I often get both good and positive evaluations on my evaluations. One of the ones that I remember most was...I had told the students to get together in groups that were different… that were differences in them…I made a comment that one group looked the same, but they were all white females with about the length blond hair, and their eye color was 01:35:00the same, and I just made that comment. I didn’t … it was just a neutral comment. But I saw evaluations at the end of the year on that exact same moment. And one student said, “I’m so glad that you made a point that on the surface we looked the same, but we had some differences and diversity.” And the very next sheet underneath it said, “I think you’re talking about how people are not, how skin color is…” It a whole negative thing about the exact same thing and I went “What?” Or I’ve even had some say, “This class… This is horrible. No one should ever take a class with Dr. Moule.” Then the very 01:36:00next evaluation, same class, is like, “Oh, this is the best class I’ve ever taken. Everyone in the university should have to take a class from her.” So it just swings. It’s this opposite thing.

But a couple more from the warm, fuzzy file. “As the term comes to an end, I think back to how crazy it’s been for me. I’ve really enjoyed my classes, but most of all, I’ve enjoyed this class. I know there are many in this class that will disagree with me and think this class may not be what they had expected. Honestly, it is not what I expected either. Dr. Moule may not know it, but she has made a pretty large impact on my life and has made me open my mind and heart even more to other people. I like this class because every Tuesday at 4 pm it seems as if it was more of a chat session where we come and talk about some of the things that have been on our minds and not just, here is a power point, memorize this, study this. The learning environment was very comfortable 01:37:00for me. I know if anyone reads this they might think that I am only saying this stuff knowing that Jean will read this and hopefully give me a good grade, but to those of you who think that, this is my Journal and I can say really whatever I want in it, another nice part of this class. I am taking this opportunity to thank you Jean for making a positive impact on my life and although I am glad for you that you are retiring, many future students are missing out on what you have given me.” That’s one.

This one: “I have Jean Moule in Multicultural Issues and Education Class. Also, she’s served as my mentor teacher in my classes and in graduate school and in the Immersion Program based in the Portland area. I honestly loved my time last year because of her dedication in making this program the best it could be. Jean is a very educated professional that taught us many things you cannot read in a textbook or hear in a lecture. She truly taught us how to live 01:38:00our lives and teach in a way that focuses on social justice and not just tolerating other cultures, but grasping them, and appreciating all cultures and ethnicities. I believe I learned so much from her. She was very kind, considerate, and compassionate person, that you knew you could count on no matter what. She was always an email or a call away, and you always felt that she would stop whatever she was doing (she’s a VERY BUSY lady!) to respond in some way. Jean was always dedicated and compassionate about teaching. She gave us a unique perspective on a teaching program as she, being African American, was able to share stories and give us strategies to use in our own placements for the six of us student teachers placed in the very diverse Northeast Portland, Humboldt and Kings school. I think of her kindness and true energy in being professor. She touched all of our lives, not just our minds. I honestly don't think my teaching license program would be the same without her. Thanks a lot.” So…

[NF] Well let's talk about your book, Cultural Competence: A Primer for Educators. How that process came about, and, I'm interested in also finding out what your thoughts were on the, at the time that you wrote the book, and when you were writing and working on your classes, what was the content that was already out there about multiculturalism in the classrooms, or if you felt there wasn't that content, and therefore you needed to write the book?

[JM] I think the books that were out there did not have the psychological component that was needed for this journey. That was my main thing. Excellent books, materials there, some have some humor in them, some have a lot of case 01:40:00studies and some stories that do make you think and respond and connect, but I didn't see one that talked specifically about how the journey itself would be psychologically difficult, and in this book, the way it came about is rather unusual. I was having a very, very busy day on campus. I had a student worker doing something in my office, and I had appointments, and then this textbook salesperson comes in with someone else with her, and I don't have time, I say "I'll talk with you for a couple minutes outside of the office" because things were happening in my office, so I just sat outside. I just really wanted to get rid of them, because, you know, I needed to do my work. They leave. I get a call 01:41:00from the guy who was with her turned out to be an editor for Wadsworth Cengage, and he had an author who'd written a book called Human Diversity: a Primer, no, Cultural Diversity: A Primer for the Human Services, and now this editor and the author wanted to do a book that was one for teachers, and he said, "Would you like to consider being part of this project?" And I met with the co-author. I liked his book, he was a counselor, and then we proceeded to do the first edition, Culture Competence: A Primer for Educators. And his name was Jerry Diller, and he came, he lived in California, he came up a couple of times. He had an aunt in Eugene, that's when I first talked to him, and he came up a couple of times and we worked on the book, which is a very long process in 01:42:00itself, and I don't know if there's anything particularly you wanted to know about that. The book itself is unusual in that it ends with interviews with specific individuals of cultural communities, working with Latino/Latina students, working with Native American Indian, Alaska Native students, working with African American students, working with Asian Pacific American students, and then I added working with, in my second edition, which is sole-authored, working with Muslim and Arab American students, and I also added one on working with European American students.

So…And then on the second edition of my book, I added a chapter on understanding unconscious bias, unintentional racism, and micro-aggressions, and that chapter and the Muslim chapter were ones that I added for my classes years before the second edition came out because it was a very difficult journey trying to get a second edition out, and when I couldn't work it out with the co- author when I was on my sabbatical, which was when I wanted to do this, I went ahead and wrote those two chapters. Well, got one chapter interviewed, and then wrote the other chapter. And as it turned out, the one on unconscious bias and unintentional racism ended up being published separately in a magazine where it got a lot of play, and so it actually turned out better for me to have done that chapter outside of the book and then change it and put it into the book. So that was a pretty interesting process. Anything else on the book?

[NF] Well, so in the book you have interviews, you have experiences, student experiences from your classes, and then a big portion of it is that psychological journey so that students understand that it's a process and it's not just reading materials, it's that it's about their own journey.

[JM] Their own journey, that's right. And I'm on that same journey, too. It continues [laughs]

[NF] So let's talk about the tenure process for you, because you went from student to professor, and I imagine that right when you became professor the tenure clock started. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[JM] Um... it was rough [laughs]. It was really, really rough. Um...I, in the shorthand, I call my tenure process both unfair and unkind. I believe that a lot of it had to do with some of the things that were going on within my faculty. I think I'd like to return to that, oh, I guess I'll just keep talking about it, but I guess this is part of the challenging part, which is part of it, so I'll 01:46:00just talk about it. I don't want to make it this invisible burden, invisible things that happen to me at the university, all about race. There was very little overt racism ever. There's lots of unconscious racism. Some of my faculty members, I believe tried to help me out, but they wanted to help me out in directions they saw, and they couldn't get that as an African American my path was going to be different, and my research instead of being mentored, was sort of being channeled, and this resistance, both mine to do where they thought I 01:47:00ought to go, and theirs to my going the way that I was feeling led, and where my, no one else was in multicultural education, so how would they know? made my collegial relationships strained, and as I began to understand more fully the institutional and societal racism that prevailed around us at a level that I had not known before, I could see myself moving further and further away from my colleagues' liberal understandings.

The Letter from Birmingham Jail that I read just a while ago, and my understanding of Nigrescence, racial identity development, helped me to understand what was happening, but I believe my colleagues shut me down. I think comments like "race has nothing to do with it" when it clearly does, even though white eyes don't see it. When someone would say "when you don't get what you want, you play the race card," I mean, that was said to me. I'm going, "well I have to be black 24/7, you know, I'm going to see it. I can't not see it, you 01:48:00know?" Black eyes. And I believe, that the sense was "Jean is not collegial." And in the promotion tenure process, no matter what anyone tells you, if someone wants you, they're going to figure out a way to get you, and if they don't, they're going to figure out a way not. I think one exception is if someone, if someone...I think that if my scholarship had been much, much deeper, I would have made it, but as you can see what I've read you, I didn't have time to do the kind of scholarship that I wanted. When I did my sabbatical, which I'll talk about in a little while, I published four articles out of that year. I mean, you 01:49:00know, I did a lot! I just didn't have time. And so, a little bit squeaked through, but not much. But at the point where, um...I was, one of the things I remember in one of the letters was "Jean hasn't graduated any PhD students." Well, there were two people who'd gotten promotion a year before me. Neither one of them had either, but on my file, that was in there. I go, "huh?" One of them have the same number of articles that I did, but they made it through, so in some ways it was just uneven, and it was unfair because I know that although you're not supposed to tell people what happens when they go through the committees and stuff, I had seen other faculty members let people know behind 01:50:00the scenes what was happening with their file and what was happening with their letters, and of course, nobody told me. So, most of my faculty knew that I hadn't made it months before I did, and that's, that's not nice [laughs]. So, I...

A little bit more about collegial things. At some point it seemed clear to me that my full acceptance at a meeting was only embraced if I left my race outside the room, and that if I brought my race into it, then they didn't want to talk about it. But why would I go to a meeting if I couldn't? Now I was not the only faculty of color to get tenure without promotion that first time, yet those I 01:51:00knew in fields that were not at all related to race fared much better. Those in objective science did not have the confounding of their lives and their field in the way that those of us in ethnic studies, or in my case multicultural education or education period did. In my article "Implementing a Social Justice Perspective in Teacher Education: Invisible Burden for Faculty of Color," a five-year self-study, I uncovered this trouble and its confounding trend. In this particular article, it's really nice because I divide it up into the teaching, research, and advising as I did, and this particular chart in it shows that over a course of five years, I was developing new courses because the needs 01:52:00that I saw within the community and my wanting to make sure that work got done, but I had to do more to meet the needs that I saw, yet again that was work that was not valued, either in the promotion and tenure process, or by my colleagues.

Let's see. Am I bitter about accepting the fact that I have to learn the differences my race makes and the fact that others will not, cannot fully understand those differences? Yet whenever I begin to talk to other African Americans about my perspective feelings, and so on, it's as if a veil is lifted. I find myself not even needing to explain. I find instant understanding. I find myself disclosing more and feeling safe. And there were times when we had zero applications from color, of students of color in our program, and my gut reaction was "I don't wanna be there." And it, the thought of soldiering most of 01:53:00the preparation of our interns to meet the needs of their future students of color was more than I wanted to undertake without a smattering of multicultural faces in the cohort. And this was very early on, and it was only when I knew I could get the students up to Portland that I could even take a deep breath and go out. So, this again, I'm going back a little bit, but this whole area of serving and advising and scholarship confounded by being black, and my work not being valued, had a lot to do with what was happening with the promotion and tenure.

I entered with an incredibly strong vita on Talented and Gifted Education yet 01:54:00was almost pushed into Multicultural Education and became quite self-taught. I could not, other colleagues could not believe I had received a PhD in my field with no mentors in this field, and again, my struggles scholarship-wise and P and T-wise had something to do with the fact that I was starting so low in my field. I was at ground-zero in both my field and my understanding of myself in it, for race became salient for me in a very different manner. Yet that uptick happened only when I came to OSU. Race was not as salient until I came to OSU, and then I got there and that was the problem. I went through the stages of racial identity development in their complexities surrounded by white colleagues, who, like myself in the beginning, thought we were at the same page in understanding the racist nature of our country and the units within it. My knowledge and understanding grew while theirs did not, and their overwhelming 01:55:00presence of whiteness only challenged when I did bring things up. Their reactions, as one might expect, was resistance, a “blame the victim” mentality. Frankly, I was not used to being the victim. I don't believe I thought of myself in that role, even when I was.

Conflict. Big conflict. And as the P and T results show, the personal and professional had crossed over. Friendships that were unexamined on the racial levels slowly dissolve. Animosity, something I very seldom struggled with, rose. I remember crying that I had lost a friend when a faculty member returned to a diagnosed state of paranoia and became paranoid of me and then misrepresented facts to others. My very environment became hostile. I remember standing outside a room looking at a close group of faculty that I also used to eat lunch with, 01:56:00yet I knew that I could only eat there if I left my race outside the door; I simply could no longer do that. I would say that I entered the university willing to be colorblind and just do my TAG material. I had presented and worked in that field for many years and race never came up in the many workshops and trainings I did. Now race comes up in almost every professional connection I have. I'm tired of it. My race consciousness should allow me to freely live my life in my brown skin, but because of my white surrounds, I am constantly reminded that I am the only person of African descent in most of my environments and interactions. The challenges of friends over the hard times of my growth and personal focus continue.[let’s pause for a minute]…for getting like this.

We need to remember that the backdrop from my time at OSU is the backdrop for the whole state of Oregon. One of the facts that I share with my students and 01:57:00most people when I have a chance to give a talk is that the statistics that in 1890 in the state of Oregon there were 100,000 people, and of that 100,000, there were 1200 African Americans. Of those, 400 lived in Portland, and 800 lived all over the state of Oregon. Fifty years later, in 1940, the population of Oregon has tripled; it’s now 300,000. The number of African Americans? 1200. The same number. Why? Because during those years, with the rise of the KKK, people of African descent were run out of, pushed out of, burned out of the small towns of Oregon. Most small towns in Oregon are all-white on purpose. And, 01:58:00if you dig deep enough, you find this, but most people don't know this. And of those 1200 that are now in the state in 1940, 800 of them live in about a 40 square block of Portland where they were pushed, course they also went there to work on the railroads, and 400 are left spread over Oregon. So that backdrop tells you why the neighborhood we're sitting in right now, and why Corvallis, and why the state is in the state that it is. So, this overwhelming presence of whiteness is in the state, and my experience at OSU is a reflection on that.

I think a lot about my sabbatical year. Because when I got tenure without promotion, I'm thinking, "It's sort of a slap in the face to get promoted, I mean for me to get tenure, but then not get a raise," and I went "but now they can't get rid of me. I've got tenure." It was a very strange combination to me, and one of the first things I did was I wanted to quit when I heard about my, the decision to give me tenure without promotion. And my daughter begged me not to. A lot of people begged me not to, and the thinking was, my thinking was that the people for who it matters, my students whose lives I input, they don't care. They don't know what my rank is. They don't care how much I get paid. Why should I leave? My writing that goes out and affects many people, whether it has "assistant" or "associate" on the bottom, it doesn't really matter. So I decided 02:00:00that I would not quit. I decided to stay, but I also had Jim Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns and the one who helps me with the honors college class I've taught a couple of times called “Sundown Towns: The Hidden Dimension of Oregon's Racism.” His book is The Hidden Dimension of America's Racism, United State's Racism.

Anyway, he was talking about a time that he had gotten tenure, and had then left, I think he was tenure and promotion, but he left before he took his sabbatical year! And I went "tenure, I get my sabbatical year," so I applied for my sabbatical year a full year before it started, and the only way that I could survive that year, the one after I had found out what the committee said, was I knew I had a sabbatical year coming up. And so when things got tough or I was 02:01:00feeling badly treated by people, I just took a deep breath and continued to do my best, and I had a great time [in my sabbatical year].

One of my images was of my work with Karen Higgins [who had a sabbatical the same year]. We wrote one article here [at my home], and then we wrote another article at her place. I remember, we'd spend a couple days writing, and then we'd go play, and I remember after we finished working on the article here, she and I took a hike up to a peak here, and when I think of my sabbatical year, I close my eyes and I still remember walking up to this peak with Karen. It was a peak experience, and I loved my sabbatical year because I was finally able to focus on the writing. I didn't have the constant emails and calls, I didn't have this program lead work, you know, someone did a great job taking it over during that year, and I got the writing out, and so I would have worked on the second 02:02:00edition, but the co-author wasn't ready yet, so I wrote those two chapters, and the one that's been so popular, “Understanding Unconscious Bias and Unintentional Racism” that was published in the Kappan was written in the very end of that year and of all the things I've written, that one short six-page article, I think, is my most important piece, and it has gone out to more people than anything else, so that was a product of my sabbatical year—took my whole year to get to that. I was quoting studies, and for this article I got to actually look them and find them and read them and really get them down instead of just telling my students "a researcher says" I could not name who the researcher was. That was really fun. I so enjoyed that, and then knowing that I was going to come back was really good.

[NF] What year was this, the sabbatical year?

[JM] Oh, I would have to look it up [laughs]. I think it was 05, 04-05? 02:03:00[2006-2007] Is that, something like that? Anyway, after the sabbatical year, enough of my colleagues had "got it" as far as institutional racism and their parts in it in multiple respective that I was nearly begged to go up for promotion, and my promotion files and everything went through so smooth you couldn't have believed it. Two years later, but it took that long ‘cause people didn't get the bigger picture. They didn't understand it, and it wasn't that was that much more—I don't think there was that much scholarship, there was some more, but mostly I think people got where I was coming from and understood more fully my, the place that I was. Now I have something from a book called Our Stories II: The Experiences of Black Professionals on Predominantly 02:04:00White Campuses, and this one is called "Giving All, Getting Half," and it's the story of my promotion and tenure. “Giving All” meaning I gave it everything I could, and you know. I put I needed to recruit students of color, outside the regular channels of process. I was compelled to develop new courses based on our efforts implemented in social justice research. I had to do that, I had to do that work. But this was the list that I started and then a couple of African American and faculty members on campus helped me with, and it's a list of the burdens, the invisible burdens that people of color have on campus, and then what we did to lighten the load on campus. So, I'll read the burden, and then I'll follow it with how we lightened the load.

(Number) 1: People on campus are surprised to see me, based on my color. Lightening the Load: Park close to building, limit walks on campus (make office an oasis), go with a colleague for distraction, go to the same places where I am already known, self-talk before walking on campus.

2: Occasionally there is an overtly racist act in my presence that surprises and disturbs me. (Did I really see/hear that? Yes, I did!) Lightening the Load: Ignore as possible, but process. Sometimes confront.

3: Reacting to verbal and nonverbal responses to my presence on campus is a level of mental and emotional work that most of my colleagues do not share. (I can) reduce level of mental and emotional work by limiting exposure.

[4:] People are more likely to exhibit prejudice from unconscious rather than 02:06:00conscious bias, and may not recognize when this is happening. However, the fact that this bias exists IS often in my consciousness and therefore a level of mental and emotional work that most of my colleagues do not share.(What do I do? I) Act as if it is not there, assume the best. In some situations, it is possible to make unconscious biases conscious.

5: Oregon has a particularly racist past. My race and my reading of Oregon history have made me more consciously aware of this than my colleagues and students. I am more likely to see this than my colleagues and students. I am more likely to see and be reminded of the current consequences of past racism. For example, while reading a student’s statement, “there was little diversity in my community,” I am very aware that the person who made the statement is probably totally ignorant of why this phenomenon occurs in Oregon,exclusion laws, early and wide-spread KKK, numerous sundown towns. Every 02:07:00time I read such statements, I am reminded of the history that produced this student’s monocultural upbringing.(What can I do?) Recognize that students’ and others’ perspectives may simply be a factor of their upbringing. Forgive ignorance.

6: Some of my students question my competency based on their overt or covert racism. This raises the standard(s) I must hold in my teaching.(I can) Continue to do my best (to lighten that load).

7: Having faced dead ends because of race or gender in the past, I am more likely to fear such in the future, so I tend to rely on my own resources when possible.(I will) Try to trust and collaborate.

8: I am asked to teach or speak in some areas and am assumed to have specialized knowledge based solely on my race.(I will) Consider each request and respond appropriately if I actually possess the knowledge and perspective needed.

9: My adaptations to these differences and multiple realities include my understanding(s) of these differences and realities and the fact that others may not understand. This causes me to be divided in my own perspective taking as I recognize both viewpoints. This may result in my participating in my own oppression through acknowledging and inadvertently accepting the other perspective(s).(To lighten the load I) Try to maintain my own perspective and not add to my oppression.

10: I am surrounded by people who do not share my racial burden (the items in this list) (for instance).(My) Lightening the Load: (I) Network at conferences. Become involved with integrated staffs in distant locations so that I am in contact with people who do share my racial perspective, and/or work in diverse settings.

11: I have to decide whether to reveal the race-based nature of some of my 02:09:00actions and decisions (such as constructing this list). That may add to the burden of race and may cause increased distance. Lightening the (Burden) Do it when expedient and necessary. Pick and (choose) battles so that I (may)live to “fight” another day.

12: My colleagues reading this list may be tempted to say “move on,” or come up with an oppression they experience occasionally and say it is the same. (I Lighten the Load)(by forgiving and by understanding.)

[NF] So based on that list it sounds like, to me, and feel free to clarify, that as one of the very few people of color on the OSU campus, perhaps you feel like you have to explain to people how they have biases and explain to people their 02:10:00prejudice attitudes, and that list of lightening the load, it sounds like it's about understanding that you can't change everyone's perspective, but you pick and choose your battles, and you, sometimes you do have to take that activist stand, and sometimes you have to let things go. Is that sort of the point of that list?

[JM] -Correct. Yes, it is, but I think that by writing it down, it, well we know that journaling helps you with difficult things anyway, and when you look at my list of publications, it's pretty interesting to see how many of them are particularly related to my role on campus. I sort of had to write about it. When I first started writing about it, I had a whole series called "views through lenses of color." I started them when I was a graduate student and I continued 02:11:00having some of these. I would often not give them to anyone, and some of those have been excerpted into some of them my articles. I think, for the most part, when you get to know someone, you reach below, beyond, above race. I mean, of course you do. And, of course that's happened on campus. I have, and I'll talk about my enduring friendships when we get to a later question. The white gaze, knowing that people are looking at you, usually through unexamined racial lenses because of our embedded society racism, is really tiring, and I, I think I just 02:12:00need to go somewhere where there are more people of color, more often, and some people see OSU as very diverse, but it's pretty much like U of O was. Well, it's more like Berkeley was when I as an undergraduate there, the percentage of students of color was about the same. So, I don't know if that answers your question [laughs]. Yeah? Alright. Well let's go with... [shuffle papers]

[NF] So, we've been discussing your challenges at OSU, but can you elaborate a little bit more on your challenges, both professional and personal, that you faced?

[JM] Um...well I think the list I read talks about it quite a bit. Obviously, just difficult times for me, and things were quite challenging. I like this quote from Cornel West, which I just got this recently: The country is in deep trouble. We’ve forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the 02:13:00courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that’s the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word. And, despair is strong, overwhelming emotion, and I would say that there were many times during my, at OSU that that feeling arose from me. There were strands that I can follow to help explore that, both personally and professionally. The list I gave you does it... [pause, shuffle of papers]

When I think about the challenges I faced, the clearly reaching out and grabbing my students and keeping them near and dear and willing to take this journey, holding them, in some cases by their hands, but knowing that I need to help change their hearts before I can change their minds. Or, “change” isn't the right word. It's like, open them up so they can see how to become their better selves, and also that they might have, without thinking about it, they've 02:15:00inhaled racism in the very air they breathe. And I was asked to do an instruction manual for my class, and I want to just talk a little bit about how my challenge to meet the students' needs finally got articulated when I wrote this just a couple months ago.

For all my courses I believe that well-begun is half-done. Therefore my first and fore-most goal is to ensure a safe and secure learning environment. I also do all that I can to ensure that my classes are brain-compatible. I often tell my students how they are brain-compatible. I want to both teach them in a brain-compatible manner, and I want them to teach their students in a brain- compatible manner, and many of these compatible ways, as you will see, clearly are going to be helpful with diverse student populations. One is an absence of 02:16:00threat. Students are more-able to engage in learning when there's no real or perceived threat. At the beginning of class I have them sign up for a partner. They have this clock and they make 12 appointments. I call it "speed dating" and they [laughs] for my class and then every week they meet with this one person to get off their chests in the first ten minutes of class what's bothered them or troubled them in the reading, or just to connect, and then that safety in one person has made it so they have had that time.

I also remove threat of grades. We have a scoring guide. I have a lot of carefully crafted assignments and a clear matrix for grading. The material itself is intense, and if they've survived it, perhaps thrived it, I'm reasonably going to accept their self-assigned grade, and you can bet that's 02:17:00usually an "A." The students are aware of this process the first hour of class, and I've removed the fear of a poor grade immediately as a barrier for their learning, so they're not afraid to discuss openly the taboo topic of race, and the other isms that that we talk about in our classes. The freedom from grade anxiety is key. Meaningful content, real-life context, the first thing they do is pick a quote, quote they like. In-fact, I used to take the quotes and I'd post them all over the halls if I could, or in classrooms, and these bulletin boards would get huge amounts of quotes, and people would be walking and they'd stop and they'd read them, and I would be encouraged by the quotes that my students put up on the board. They didn't have to be multiculturally related; a lot would. Some would pick sayings from their faith. It didn't matter. I let them choose them and put them up. I never had a hateful quote put up. They were always positive and nice, but I remember an older woman who worked in the office 02:18:00had the responsibility of removing the quotes off the board, and I still have them, by the way somewhere, a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them, off the board, and I went up and I watched her, and she was crying! And I asked her, "Why are you crying?" She said "I am just so moved by these quotes."

So the very first day in class, my students put some of themselves up for everyone else to see, so I begin to bring them out of themselves with meaningful content. And the other thing, of course, is the journals, I gave you some examples about that, and I give them a rich environment. We take two field trips. One is usually a diverse school, even if it's just for a few hours, and the other one we go walking through town from the university to the river, and we pretend we're someone else, we're walking through Corvallis and they can choose whether they're blind or deaf or taller or smaller than they are, or 02:19:00skinnier or fatter than they are, female if they're male, male if they're female, different color skin, whatever they want, and then they just imagine what it's like to walk through town in the images they see reflected in different places. That's another way I bring reality to them and the content is meaningful.

I try to get them outside, and my tests involve movement and collaboration with each other. Lots and lots of choices for the brain-compatible education. They choose one of three books: Lies my Teacher Told Me, Other People's Children, or Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting In Together in the Cafeteria? They choose one of those three books along with the textbook for the coursework, and then they, sometime I also have one day of open discussion. they pick any topic that's under multicultural education, and there's a huge range, then they get in a 02:20:00discussion group for that day, so I give them choices so that they're fully engaged and they're not just doing what I think they should do, and if they do that with their own students, they're going to be much more culturally competent.

They have adequate time. I have very few due dates. They just have to spread things out. Collaboration, they work together. The group oral midterm I think is just this great, great activity. They always prepare, they don't really notice that there's no score on the scoring guide for the midterm, or the final, there's no score, but they still prepare, and they sit at a table using the clocks when there's four of them, and I write all the list and things from our coursework that they need to know, mental stuff. I have them on the whiteboard on blanks, and then each team has to go and fill in one blank in each section, and it's sort of a race, and 11 minutes, and then we go over it. Well, what's 02:21:00happened? Everybody's participated in it, I just have to grade what's on the whiteboard, if it's a mistake, I erase it, and then we just review it. And so in half an hour, they've all had to do it, and the embarrassment of not being ready for this exam keeps most of them on it even though I'm not grading them.

So that's a collaboration, safety, no test, they're learning it, I mean it's a fun day, it really is, and then after they do the fill-in, then we have the essay question part, where they choose different questions from three different sections, you know: why are multiple intelligence useful for cultural competent teaching, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, and then immediate feedback, I try to give them during the group oral midterm, of course it's instant feedback, and mastery, I try to get them to know their material by putting it together at 02:22:00the end of the year in a synthesis paper because they've had so very many different kinds of learning and they've made so many choices, I almost have to do that so I can get a sense of what they've done, so the challenge I think has been to keep the material in the class professionally brain-compatible.

[NF] So, although you've had many challenges, I think it would be nice to end talking about some of your triumphs at OSU, and those good experiences, and your legacy, because you've done so much good so I think we need to definitely talk about that work.

[JM] Okay. On one level, I am happier with the OSU-related friends I have now, 02:23:00than the one friend [at OSU] I had when I entered, and this would be a personal triumph. The TACKI group, here they are, right here, started my last full year at OSU, and some of us meet together about once a month in some manner yet, if I'm on campus as we plan ahead, putting the initial of the day of the group on the front of our afternoon caching and kegging intelligentsia, so if it's a Tuesday, it’s a Tuesday afternoon caching and kegging intelligentsia. It's far more than just the fun activity; it would be the closest I have to a professionally connected, positive, social, and often intellectually stimulating group. In May 2010, I casually said to my husband "I wonder if I can get 65 geocaches on my 65th birthday.” Now geocaching is a game you play using a GPS 02:24:00and you find these things hidden all over. There's a million and a half all over the world. I'm nearly at 2,500 myself and the people in the picture there are well over 10,000 together. It's a game. It's an adventure. It's a way to get exercise. My husband laughed when I told him I was going to get 65 on one day. I told the TACKI group about it, and planning started. I’ll share the events using the geonames of the participants; their real first names are listed on the photo of the day. But here’s the key. After we had a date, I put the date on my work calendar and then went to the invite attendees for the four people of the group who were OSU employees, they all responded “yes” and they had to 02:25:00plan to take the day off from work, ‘cause it was on a Wednesday. But for me it says a lot about friendship that a group of people are willing to get together for a day off to help me celebrate and have an adventuresome day.

I am going to stop here to briefly tell a story that happened in my life the day before we did this 65 for 606, because 606 is my geocaching name. My husband and I had just driven back from Sun Valley, Idaho and he had had, I’m going to start earlier. The day before he, you know what let’s just skip that last 02:26:00part. I’m not sure I’m going to talk about this. By the time we met at 5:30 am on Wednesday October 27th, Rytmss, our organizer leader, had assigned each person in this group a role. Kgones would drive, Rytmss would navigate, Bbelly and Trex would record while Geogecko99 and Salmondan would jump out with me to grab the cache. Toward the end Fox55alive joined us in his car and came along, to end the day Rytmss put in a cache whose name was 65-4-606. 606 spells “mom” on the phone keys, as I began the journey, the adventure and game because my son was on it. We began the day at my mother’s house at 5:30 am in Salem, where she had some coffee and muffins waiting for us. There I was surprised with bright yellow matching T-shirrs that said, “I survived 65-4-606.” Including a couple of caches that took a walk with all of us, we 02:27:00triumphed at 3:06 pm. I smile when I think of how this group enlivened and enhanced my last few years at OSU. I had planned my two face to face classes for the late afternoon on Tuesdays, having one from 2- 3:50 (TCE 519) and another from 4-5:50 (TCE 219). That class went to three credits so for awhile that class went from 4 to almost 7:00pm. So that was a series of classes from 4-7 in the afternoon. Sometimes on the first day I stand before the class knowing that if I do it the way I hope, I will change lives and sometimes I do. It is emotionally draining and physically tiring to do these classes in a row.

For the last two years at OSU, we would have a TACKI group at lunchtime, on Tuesdays. Sometimes we would be able to start at 11:30 and/or go until 1:30. Surprisingly, most days the cache hunt included a short hike. What would my students have missed if their instructor had not had this refreshing and energizing midday break? We have memories. The one most often shared to others by the person who witnessed it, was the trip to one particularly difficult cache. It was in the middle of a large cement culvert under the road near the sheep facility. It was raining off and on that day and there was about 5 inches of water in the pipe. There were rocks and blackberry vines on the slope leading down to where the culvert went under the road. I took off my teaching-shoes, put the corner of my longish skirt in my mouth so it would not get wet and waded in. It was cold and I could not be sure of my objective in the culvert under the road. I also did not want to appear in class too muddy. So I carefully backed 02:29:00out. I walked back to my car along the bicycle path barefooted so that I would not get the inside of my shoes dirty or wet.

That was what I call an evil cache. I got it eventually [laughs] and then I went to teach. There are many caches all around campus and eventually I found them all. Hidden many myself, but not on campus, though Rytmss, one of the cachers does. My friend count at OSU, considering a level of relationship that are not built on just personal interactions during work related events. At OSU, I had one before I entered, I lost her. I made and lost one. One that I will never know if there is a friendship there or not, I don’t think so. I made lasting, 02:30:00four friends. Through geocaching I made lasting, three friends. In Corvallis, I made one sporadic, but lasting. And then through geocaching. I made some acquaintances though they didn’t become friends. So that makes, I think I got my count about 8 friends and that is a personal triumph for my time at OSU.

There are some fond acquaintances, some colleagues I will remember with warm feelings. And there are people I will be happy to never see again. Amazingly I leave OSU with warm feelings and connections with both Sabah and Ed Ray. I remember my journey at OSU as one of awakening and of sometimes great pain. Despair does sometimes fit. I was surprised the feelings that preparing for this interview awakened. Just a very uncomfortable few days. I am amazed at all I could accomplish with so much undercurrent, while I was there.

My biggest triumph professionally was the publication of the second edition of my textbook, though that did not happen until I reached emeritus status. I marvel that, as far as I know, I am the only one in the elementary education faculty to produce a single-author textbook. And they hesitated to recognize my national standing and influence? And I know that the Immersion Program has made an incredible difference in the lives of 100 MAT students and 1000’s of their students. I was interviewed by a student from a woman leadership class and this is a lot about my work and I would like to, second to the last ending, share it.

For my Woman’s Leader Interview I interviewed Jean Moule. Dr. Jean Moule presented with her sister at the Oregon Women in Higher Education Conference 02:32:00this past January. I was extremely impressed with their presentation and intrigued with what an amazing woman Dr. Moule was. After emailing her on a whim she agreed to be interviewed, and I was thrilled and nervous. On Monday, February 4, 2008, I journeyed to her office with my questions in hand and ready to be on time and make use of her busy time. When she appeared running in from a meeting that had kept her late she seemed frazzled but happy to meet me. She offered me a place to sit and we were on our way. However, what amazed me during my five prepared questions was how genuine, forthcoming and nervous she seemed to be. I was the one who was nervous because she is the amazing leader. My thought going into this interview was that people asking to interview her must happen all the time. But this nervousness translated to great humility and authenticity. My respect for her grew. I began by asking her for her definition 02:33:00of a leader. She said that a leader is “someone who sets a goal or vision that no one else can see and helps themselves and others get there.” She also used the phrase “a guide on the side not a sage on the stage.” I followed up by asking her whether she believed she is a leader. She replied by starting that there are three things she sees a person can do in life. The options are: lead, follow, and get out of the way. She deeply believed that she can never follow. She learned that about herself as a little girl. She will though, get out of the way if the movement is not where she wants to go. But ultimately she will tend to take the lead if no one else follows, even if no one else follows. At this point she wanted to go off the record and tell me several ways she had lead alone. I was amazed at her honesty and willingness to let me into these parts of her life.

I followed with asking her how being a woman has made a difference in her 02:34:00leadership style. She moved back to the conversation with the idea she is more drawn to a consensus than leadership. She says that being a woman makes it difficult to be a leader. Also that being a black woman makes it difficult to be a leader. This is mainly because others do not accept her in a leadership role. She said that sometimes it is just too big of a fight. Instead she tries to get things going by influencing. Basically, she sees herself as more of an activist and agitator. She will just start walking in the direction she needs to go and will hope that others join. Moule then concluded her answer to my question by stating that she feels she must be the voice for those who have no voice. She has to do this. My fourth question asked her about how her leadership journey has looked. She responded by saying that in looking back to her youth for comparison she now has more confidences in sense of direction that she has to 02:35:00take. She now knows that the direction she is going is a good one. My final question asked her who her leaders were. She listed: for politics Avel Gordly, a State Senator for Oregon, and in history Fannie Lou Hammer, a civil rights activist. Her next three leaders were really touching to me because they were all women from the Bible. Esther from the Old Testament inspired Moule because she did what she needed to do for her people and said “if I perish, I perish.” The other two women from the New Testament were both from the New Testament and were both women I had never heard of, Lydia and Junias. Junias was the only woman apostle of Jesus and Lydia was a deacon in the New Testament of the Bible and the first convert to Christianity in Europe.

Moule’s inclusions of these women inspired me because in my leadership journey I seek to blend my academic learning of leadership with my Christian faith and having great women of scripture pointed out as a leader fills me with joy, pride 02:36:00and direction. Moule’s last few leaders were Obama, because she wanted to include a man, who she saw a great voice of change and was inspired how he knows to work with people and to get people to agree. This is a skill she wishes she was more proficient in. She also mentions President Ed Ray because of the great things she believes he has done for the Oregon State University. Moule ultimately claims her children are her great leaders because the lead her to new knowledge and understanding and she likes to follow them.

After the interview we said goodbye, and I was left reflect on this humble yet strong and inspiring woman; who I believe is a great leader. On a professional level, I would have to say that speaking at the commencement was a high point of 02:37:00my life. I went through 20 drafts. I asked 20 different people for feedback; I spent a lot of time on it. This was in 2003: As a guide on the side, the first course assignment I give my students is to select a guiding quote. I often borrow from the quotes students post near my office or on the web. The one by the phone reminds me, “The first step to wisdom is silence; the second is listening.” The quote on my computer me gets me through writer’s block, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” And the quote over my desk quiets my frustration with, “You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.” Our quote for today is, “A genius is someone who aims for something that no one else can see, and hits it.” I would 02:38:00like each of us to find an application for this quote. So let’s just take a moment to substitute a term for “genius” that we can live with. You could insert “innovator” or “risk-taker,” “change agent,” “one who makes a difference,” or “tenacious going-to-get-this-done hard worker.” If “genius” works for you, use it. Here’s a little story to illustrate the quote: At a 4th of July picnic a few years ago at a friend’s farm in the Cascade foothills, the guys held a shooting match. Although I had never fired a gun before, I decided to integrate the match…they needed a woman.

I was handed a rifle used by our host to protect himself from grizzly bears in Alaska -- a 45.70. As I struggled to balance the heavy thing, snickers began: 02:39:00“Just shoot it, Jean” and “be careful; it’s loaded.” There were targets at 25 and 50 yards and a 10 inch bright green saw blade in a tree 100 yards way -- that’s a football field. I was about to pull the trigger when the owner of the gun leaned over and whispered in my ear aim a little high. I did. I nearly fell backward from the recoil…Everyone was watching me…except one guy looking through a pair of binoculars, who asked, “Jean, what were you aiming at?” “The saw blade,” I said. He said “It’s gone.” The remnants of the saw blade hang in my office to remind me to aim a little higher and a little farther at those points that both myself and others can barely see. I recall another time that aimed high, reaching for a mark that my teacher could not see. 02:40:00I disliked history or, more accurately, the monocultural perspective I was taught and I had to repeat a U.S. History class in summer school. I put my heart into it this time and wrote a stirring, creative beginning to my paper on the Oregon trail. My teacher did not believe me, an African American student, when I told her I wrote it myself. Discouraged by her low estimation of ethnic minorities, I did not bother finishing the research paper and received another low grade. Her skepticism and her assumptions hampered my interest in writing as well as in history.

Much later, as a classroom teacher, I found Oregon history peculiarly intriguing: Oregon hosted on its soil a moment of inclusion when a Black man, Clark’s slave, York, and a Native woman, Sacajawea, voted along with rest of 02:41:00the expedition for the location of its winter camp. Yet, Oregon’s history is marred by racist laws, including one exclusion law that prohibited blacks from settling in the territory altogether. Violators were to be whipped every six months, the law declared “until he or she shall quit the state.” A later version merely assessed Blacks, Chinese, Hawaiians an annual $5 tax for the privilege of living in Oregon. This legacy of exclusion is seen today in the absence of People of Color in many Oregon communities. In the refreshingly candid and honest work I receive from my students at OSU, I often see a willingness to consider how such matters affect us today. One student shared that when he is around people who are not from what he calls the “White Protestant norm,” he sometimes feels uncomfortable. He attributes this to his 02:42:00lack of childhood experiences. He said, “I’m not racist, but… I’m just not used to being around them.” As he heard the subtle racism in his own statement, he realized that he had used the phrase before and had heard it said many times around him. My son says that when he hears “I’m not a racist but….” It is a guarantee that the rest of the sentence is. Not willfully racist, but hurtful none the less. Other quotes from my class “I will never tell a racist joke, so I’m not a racist, but…I have laughed at other people’s racist jokes,” and in the course, “It will never again be okay to laugh at a racist joke or even to keep silent when one is being told.” These students are beginning to understand their own roles in the subtle, often, hidden racism that surrounds us all. Every term, my students report to me that 02:43:00when they take the time to open their eyes they notice that while shopping, while driving, while meeting, People of Color are treated differently. One said “Race shouldn’t matter, but in this country, it still does- to everyone.”

Let’s take my own case. I am one of very few African American faculty members at OSU. What is it like to be this brown face in a sea of whiteness?:It is as if we are all on a river that flows quietly and gently along. Most of my friends, students, and colleagues float on this river in a strong, sturdy boat of their majority status - a boat I cannot get into because I am not White. The river, our societal mainstream, is accepted and hardly noticed. I manage to swim or float alongside the boat as I am learning how to navigate this mainstream. Every 02:44:00once in awhile someone in the boat notices my struggle and tosses out an inner tube or briefly holds my hand. And then sometime, someone reaches out and pushes my head under with, “Just get over this race thing, Jean.” I sputter, resurface, and continue on. In the long run, I figure it makes sense to construct a raft for myself. So while I talk to those in the boat and we run difficult rapids together, at the same time, I must lash together whatever supportive materials I can find. The response? “Hey, how come Jean gets a raft?” If I say, “Because I can’t get in the boat with you and I’m getting tired of staying afloat without more support,” some say, “What boat?”

Many grapple with the complex issues raised by this metaphor, whether it applies to race or other areas of difference. The challenge for those in the water and 02:45:00for those in the boat is to reach out for each other on their common journey while aiming to make a difference in the very river that carries us all along. Now, the day that I gave this speech I continued on with words of encouragement for those in the audience about how in 1903, in 1803 was Lewis and Clark and getting to Oregon, in 1903 the Wright brothers flew their craft, they had Sublimity connections, and in 2003 we were graduating. So we ended on that; an up note that they would aim to make a difference, and aim to go for a higher place. And I remember when I was finished, Tim White the interim president gave me a ribbon that said “I make a difference” which is a ribbon that I have given many people at the university and almost all my [graduate] students at one 02:46:00point or another have receive one of these ribbons as I told them how they make a difference. But I ended the speech as the importance of aiming to make a difference.

I want to end this interview with an excerpt from the end of both my dissertations and my textbook: “The travelers stopped to rest. They looked back the way they had come. The path seemed longer and more difficult than they had remembered: Their talk as they walked must have helped to smooth the way. Now that they had the vantage point if the ridge, they saw that what they had perceived as a summit had been the beginning of the foothills. They continued on.”