About me...
I am a professor of English and English Education, chair of the English Program, and director of the Oregon Writing Project at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in Ashland, Oregon. Before coming to SOU, I worked as a director of instruction at the Institute of Reading Development, a teacher, and then as a researcher at the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools in Oakland, California. And although the IT support staff at SOU have a hard time believing it, my first job was as a microcomputer support specialist on a university campus!
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In 1997, while working on my dissertation for my PhD in education (Language, Literacy, and Culture) at UC Berkeley, I began the research that—24 years later!—became the book A Hidden History of Youth Development: Learning in Transition.
The story of Learning in Transition
This book was nearly 25 years in the making! In 1997, I took an exploratory research trip to South Africa.
I had been teaching in an alternative education (GED) program for young adults in San Francisco. My master’s thesis had investigated their perceptions of learning — what learning meant for them — and I was feeling around for a good related focus for my PhD dissertation. South Africa had recently held its first democratic elections after years of anti-apartheid struggle, and it seemed like an interesting place to do a similar study, looking at what learning might mean in alternative education settings for young adults in a country that was undergoing rapid socio-economic and political transition. Post-apartheid South Africa was also a good bet for finding research funding at the time. Several grants, including a Fulbright dissertation fellowship, made it possible for me to spend 18 months in Johannesburg.
A series of fortuitous connections led me to the Joint Enrichment Project (JEP). JEP was a prominent youth-development NGO with strong roots in anti-apartheid resistance. I was privileged to be invited into JEP as a visiting researcher, where I got to know a group of young adults from Soweto, the townships outside Johannesburg.
I returned to California, completed my dissertation in 2000, and then did not follow the advice of my advisors at the time, to “write the book now!” But the friends I had made, including participants and staff at the NGO, tugged at my heart. I returned for several extended visits over the years, and by the time of my sabbatical from my university teaching job in 2018, I was finally ready to write that book. The intervening years presented a unique opportunity to look back at how the lives of JEP’s participants and staff had changed over two decades, and to consider the significance of the NGO in retrospect—its role in the politics and history of South Africa, its influence on youth development, and the continued relevance of its legacy today.
