Regine Biscoe’s first quarter of college got less lonely when she discovered that one of the UW’s student leaders was a fellow Pacific Islander.

“I called my mom and said, ‘There’s this ASUW vice president and he’s from Guam, too!’ ” Biscoe recalled. “Seeing that was really empowering for me.”

The vice president turned out to be Michael Tuncap, one of the founders of Pacific Islander Partnerships in Education (PIPE), a mentorship program that will receive a 2003 Brotman Diversity Award.

PIPE participants say there’s no conflict at all between encouraging Pacific Islander students to get involved in campus leadership and helping them focus on their academic work through regular peer mentoring sessions.

“What is innovative about PIPE is that we do not separate schoolwork from individual and social lives,” faculty mentor Rick Bonus said. “We teach them how to balance these components so that they end up as well-rounded students.”

PIPE evokes great enthusiasm from the eight upper-division students from Tonga, Palau, Samoa, Hawaii and the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific who serve as mentors to younger UW undergraduates also from the Pacific Islands.

Some of them remember when PIPE was established, in the spring of 1999, to fill a serious void. David Ga’oupu Palaita, the student director and a mentor, said the UW administration had rolled out outreach programs to attract Pacific Islanders, but there was little in place to support the students once they got in.

“We had the recruitment but not the retention,” Palaita said. “Too many of the students came in feeling that the University was too big a place, and there was something missing culturally.”

Bonus, an associate professor of American Ethnic Studies, helped beat the bushes for seed money. A Filipino American, Bonus continues to serve as the unpaid faculty mentor and a nearby role model for the academic life.

The program’s $17,500 share of the Brotman award will help provide $500 stipends for each of the eight students who meet regularly as mentors with about five other undergraduates each. The award also will provide funds for cultural events, attendance at conferences and visits to graduate schools.

Three PIPE alumni, including Tuncap, already attend top graduate schools. Other participants have received national fellowships and scholarships, serve as UW Student Ambassadors and assume various leadership roles on campus. And several of the current mentors began by having a PIPE mentor of their own.

PIPE’s admirers include Nancy “Rusty” Barcelo, vice president for minority affairs, who has provided funding and considers it a model for other campus groups to follow.

“This fills a void in the students’ lives and enriches the participants’ academic experience,” she wrote in her nominating letter. “The sense of community created by this project attends to both individual and collective needs.”

And high among those needs, said Palaita, the student director, is helping students survive the rough patches that accompany many a college career.

“Everybody has a turning point when you want to give up,” Palaita said. “Through PIPE, we can support each other to get through those times.”

– Steven Goldsmith

^ table of contents

The Center for Multicultural Education, a winner of a 2003 Brotman Diversity Award, recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. But that milestone is a bit deceiving.

In truth, the center’s foundation was laid in the 1950s in the southern United States.

There on the Arkansas delta a young James Banks asked himself why there were just three African American heroes — Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and Marian Anderson — in his schoolbooks? And why, he wondered, were the slaves in those same books always smiling and seemingly happy?

It was a portrayal that was far different from the reality he and other southern blacks faced at the time.

“Whose images were these?” Banks recently recalled wondering as a child. “Who made the slaves happy? This notion of the happy slave, this question, became a major focus in my career.”

After working as a fifth-grade teacher in Chicago, Banks earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Soon after that he became one of the first black faculty at the UW and the first in the College of Education. He was the first African American to earn tenure while at this institution.

And 23 years later, still in pursuit of answers about knowledge construction, Banks formed the Center for Multicultural Education. In the 10 years since then there have been a mind-boggling number of accomplishments. What started out as Banks and a research assistant has grown into a crew of nine faculty and 13 affiliated faculty.

There have been numerous publications, including the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, which won the 1997 Multicultural Book Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education. There have been other awards and distinctions too. Banks, for example, served as the president of the American Educational Research Association in 1998. And perhaps most importantly, there have been countless educators trained that are now in the field working to increase sensitivity to the varied cultures represented in the nation’s classrooms.

“The increasing number of former students like myself who have gone on to continue the work of the center at other universities speaks to its wide-reaching influence beyond the University of Washington,” Tyrone Howard, a former center research assistant who now serves as an assistant professor at UCLA, wrote in support of the center’s nomination for the Brotman Award.

Seeing young faculty like Howard carry on his work is especially rewarding for Banks. In fact, it’s imperative, he says, because there is still work to be done.

“There are other challenges,” Banks said. “It’s a continuing issue. For example, when you look at support for the war in Iraq, the percentages of African Americans and whites were opposite. Seventy percent of whites supported the war and 30 percent of African Americans did. So that becomes a question to me of knowledge construction. Why?”

And it’s an issue, he says, that goes beyond black and white.

What began as a movement based on inclusiveness and equity for black Americans became multiethnic and then, with the inclusion of issues such as gender and second language learning, became multicultural education. These remain important and relevant issues both in the United States and abroad, Banks says.

In fact, the center hosted an international conference, “Ethnic Diversity and Citizenship Education in Multicultural Nation-States,” last summer in Bellagio, Italy. Educators from 12 countries were represented at the event that was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. The gathering was proof that the center is as relevant today as it was 10 years ago. It also spoke of how Banks’ work resonates with even a global audience.

But despite the center’s international reputation, Banks says he won’t forget where it all started — back in Marianna, Ark., when a young Banks wasn’t allowed into the public library because of the color of his skin.

“Those experiences had a profound impact on my life that is evident every day in my work. I’m trying to make sure that my children’s children and all of America’s children will not have to experience anything like that. Out of segregation came my deep commitment to freedom. I see the center, then, as another manifestation of this quest for freedom.”

– Steve Hill

^ table of contents

Many of the undergraduate students who enter the UW’s School of Drama are focused on becoming professional actors and actresses. They arrive thinking they will be starring in an endless cycle of productions and graduate to the glamorous world of New York or Los Angeles.

Instead, the students find a program that requires them to spend time backstage as well as onstage and to dip into fields outside drama as well. Moreover, many of the plum roles in drama school productions go to graduate students. It’s a setup for disappointment and class warfare. Yet, there are no riots breaking out in Hutchinson Hall, except perhaps the laugh riots sometimes found in the building’s Cabaret Theater. Instead, one finds an undergraduate program so vibrant that it’s won a Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence.

The faculty are certainly one of the reasons. Described by Director Sarah Nash Gates as a “remarkable group of artists and scholars,” virtually all of them teach undergraduates as well as graduates, and they’re generous with their time. “Every professor I have had here has always said that if you want to work on something — even if it is for an audition and not for class — just ask,” says senior Andy Kidd. “This work ethic is never the exception; it seems to be the rule.”

In a way, the Drama School is being honored for its undergraduate program precisely because it doesn’t do what those would-be actors and actresses wish it would. It requires students to complete rigorous courses in critical theory and theater history, stubbornly insisting on producing broadly educated graduates emblematic of the Bachelor of Arts degree they will earn. And it makes up for the scarcity of undergraduate roles by offering something better.

As graduating senior Emily Cedergreen puts it, “One of the things the department does very well is to give undergraduates lots of encouragement and support to go out and make their own opportunities.”

In other words, a part in the school play isn’t the ultimate goal that it is in high school. Instead, the school pushes undergraduates to “find their own voices,” Drama Professor Robyn Hunt says. It’s a focus she brought with her when she came to the UW in 1988 as head of the undergraduate program.

About the same time, the Hutchinson gym (the building formerly housed women’s physical education) was being converted to the Cabaret, a performance space just for undergraduates. With the formation of the Undergraduate Theater Society the stage was set — literally.

“Whatever idea you have in your head, you can propose to the society,” Kidd says. “And there’s money there to produce it for an audience. It’s a really great way for people to experiment.”

The opportunities for self expression only expanded when Shanga Parker, who succeeded Hunt as head of the BA program, introduced Once Upon a Weekend, a program in which anyone can sign up to write a play overnight, then see it produced the following night with a volunteer cast and crew.

The event gives undergraduates a chance to mix it up with faculty and grad students. Casts and crews are randomly selected, so an undergraduate can, for example, wind up directing a faculty play.

Nor are students limited to UW productions. Because many faculty are working artists as well as teachers, they help students, including undergraduates, to work in professional theater. Both Cedergreen and Kidd were interns at Seattle Children’s Theatre this year, for example. Cedergreen played a role she’ll be repeating this fall as a professional.

The result of all the creative ferment is that many of those freshman actors and actresses wind up with a different ambition by the time they graduate.

Like Kidd. After producing and directing a play through UTS, he’s applying to graduate programs in theater management, hoping to land an administrative position at a theater. But down the road, he’d like to have his own theater.

It’s that kind of opening up of the worldview that the School of Drama wants to foster. As acting director Barry Witham puts it, “It is our intention — and hope — that our students build upon the framework of the idea of theater as not just occupation but as vital and enduring human expression.”

– Nancy Wick

^ table of contents

Expect it to be hard. Your child is so smart that school has been easy so far. Teachers have been easy to please. Things are going to be different now. TS will be unlike anything you or your child have experienced. It’s not impossible, but it may feel like it at times. The teachers will suggest how much time your child should budget. Don’t start with less. Budget at least that much and then cut it back if possible. Your child is probably a good reader – that’s good because they will need to be. TS students read about 400 pages a week.

Thus starts a page of suggestions gleaned from parents whose children have already attended TS, or the Transition School. The school, part of the Early Entrance Program under the umbrella of the University of Washington’s Halbert and Nancy Robinson Center for Young Scholars, is a place where kids can be kids while still fulfilling their intellectual promise.

Each year the program enrolls 16 transition students, all enter at age 14 or under, most having completed seventh or eighth grade. On the UW campus they stay together to compress four or five years of secondary school into three academic quarters. After graduating from Transitional School they become EEPers — Early Entrance Program students — full-time undergraduates but with a special advisor, a lounge and continuing faculty mentorship.

The Early Entrance Program has a clear-cut goal to put Washington’s best and brightest students on a path to success as scholars and as leaders, according to David Notkin, professor and chair of computer sciences and engineering. “The impact that EEP has, despite being a small program, is enormous, because those students at the very top end of UW’s student body are the ones that truly make UW special.”

Psychology chair Ana Mari Cauce says, “The EEP is a perfect example of what the Brotman is all about, an innovative unit dedicated to providing its undergraduate students with the very best learning experience possible, both inside and outside the classroom.”
More than 210 early entrance program students, some 94 percent, have graduated from the UW with one or more baccalaureate degrees in fields as diverse as music, classics, biochemistry, computer science and dance. At least half earn places on the dean’s list each quarter.

“Over the life of our programs we’ve nurtured two Rhodes scholars, five Goldwater scholars, three dean’s and three junior medalists, three NASA Space Grant scholars, three Bonderman travel fellows and our students have earned numerous university scholarships.” says Kathleen Noble, director of the Robinson Center for Young Scholars, the Halbert and Nancy Robinson professor and associate professor of women studies.

The faculty, staff and teaching assistants work together to help early entrance program students to broaden their ideas about learning and achievement.

“We want them to develop a concept of success that allows them to make mistakes and recover, to take risks and explore unfamiliar territory, and to appreciate the hard work that underlies creativity and accomplishment,” Noble says.

A parent wrote, “I had the unfamiliar experience of seeing my son become utterly focused on his work, so that family excursions such as bike rides would be forcibly curtailed to allow him to return to work. Strangest of all was the realization that he was actually enjoying these demands! I believe the reason my son was able to go through the year with good memories was the exceptional quality of teaching provided by the faculty and their commitment to high but fair expectations, and finally the close relationship they developed with the 16 students in the class.”

There is a widespread belief that so-called “gifted children” are universally economically privileged, come from intact functional families and have no need of special educational support. Some of the center’s students come from intact, two-parent homes but others do not.

The center operates on an almost self-sustaining basis, with support for its programs through fees for service, tuition for transition school and summer programs, and per student funding from the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

“There is very little state budget support of the center,” George Bridge, dean of undergraduate education and professor of sociology, said in a letter of nomination. “In my opinion this makes the center’s accomplishment even more remarkable.”

– Sandra Hines

^ table of contents