Recast | Tacoma Faculty and Staff Notes

From: “Williamson, Elizabeth” <williame@evergreen.edu>
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 at 4:37 PM

Dear colleagues,

In the middle of this light-starved season, I’m delighted to share with you some of the radiant achievements of our Tacoma colleagues. I will make sure that these are archived on the web ASAP, but I didn’t want to wait any longer to share them with you. Our next edition of Faculty Notes will feature the Native Pathways Program. 

 Warmly,

   Elizabeth

Tacoma Faculty & Staff Notes

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Trey Appelgate (he/him) finished his BA with Evergreen Tacoma in 2020 and was part of the team that assisted with faculty and students’ transition to the new remote learning environment. Some notable remote events he supported were a conversation with the Dalai Lama, the reimagined Tacoma Spring Fair event, a conversation with Maseno University in Kenya, and the Tacoma Virtual Graduation Ceremony. He is currently working to archive our digital presence and create content for the future of the Tacoma campus. 

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Dr. Tate Arunga (she/her) published a chapter in the anthology entitled, They Will Lead Africa, second edition. Her book, The Stolen Ones and How They Were Missed (2017), was produced as a short film by world-renowned cultural worker Mama Charlotte Oneal, entitled WARAJEAJI: The Stolen Ones Returned.

In addition, Dr. Tate Arunga was honored in 2020 with the Bethune / Nzinga Community Achievement Award, by Summit Sierra High School Black Student Union. And Dr. Tate Arunga served on the OSPI African American Curriculum Task Force in 2020.

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Peter Bacho (he/him) has been working with the University of Washington Press on his mini-memoir collection in progress, Mostly True Stories: A Love Note to Seattle and to a Filipino Community that No Longer Exists. Earlier this month the collections editor at the UW Press sent Mostly True Stories out for artistic review.

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Marla German (she/her) When not helping faculty and students in her role as Program Secretary on the Tacoma Campus, Marla enjoys being creative. You can see a variety of her work (and some gratuitous cat photos) at www.instagram.com/marlagerman. 

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Besides teaching at Evergreen-Tacoma, Dr. Mingxia Li (the poet, librettist and translator Zhang Er, All Pronouns) saw her 3rd poetry collection in English translation published by Zephyr Press. The book, titled First Mountain, was written in collaboration with American poet and Professor of Practice Joseph Donahue of Duke University. She co-edited and participated in the translation of The Art of Women in Contemporary China: Both Sides Now with Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, Oskar Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art at Bard College. At the “& Now Points of Convergence” conference, an annual event hosted by University of Washington-Bothell (2019), she presented one of her new operatic libretti, Fantasia Verde, with Jonathan Balsley (Evergreen student) and Andrew Buchman (Evergreen faculty). She also participated in a panel, “Beyond Return: Translation, Diaspora, and the Poetics and Politics of Origin” with Quenton Baker, and Susan Gevirtz at the same conference.

She continued her collaboration with Prof. Gregory Youtz of Pacific Lutheran University in completing their opera Tacoma Method, which was scheduled to be performed by Symphony Tacoma but was canceled due to COVID-19. However, she was commissioned by the local Chinese Reconciliation Foundation to write a children’s story for their virtual Tacoma Moon Festival at Chinese Reconciliation Park (http://tacomamoonfestival.org, 2020). Her opera (with composer Stephen Dembski), Moon in the Mirror, saw another performance during the Chinese New Year’s celebration at Cleveland State University.

She joined the editorial board of the Chinese poetry journal First Line New York, contributed poetry and translation, and edited its WeChat bimonthly journal as well as its printed biannual journal. She continued her struggle with her seventh poetry manuscript in Chinese, triggered by her mother’s decline and passing in 2017 and compounded by her father’s passing in April 2020.

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Dr. Paul McCreary (he/him) has been living in Taiwan for the past year and a half. For the first year he was on sabbatical, investigating how adult education mathematics instructors support their students who feel anxious about returning to the classroom. To facilitate communication with these educators, Dr. McCreary enrolled in Mandarin language classes. 

In addition to visiting adult education classes, Dr. McCreary joined with a mathematics instructor at a local adult community center to conduct a series of math and English workshops. It was an exciting interchange among faculty and between students and faculty. Further, Dr. McCreary was able to share many of the math worksheet problems developed by a collective of math professors in Tacoma for public school teachers in the south Puget Sound area. The math instructor in Taiwan collaborated with Dr. McCreary to translate these problems into Mandarin and to modify problem statements to accommodate the students’ cultural background.

Recently, Dr. McCreary enrolled in a master’s degree program in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, including coursework in Generative Phonology and Teaching Vocabulary. He looks forward to translating this degree into skills and teaching techniques for Evergreen Tacoma students, many of whom are English language learners.

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Dr. Gilda Sheppard (she/her) has been busy these past two years. Sheppard has presented at national conferences, including the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ 2019 Summer Institute. She has also been working with colleague Sarah Ryan, along with other faculty and administrators nationally, on Bringing Theory to Practice and Great Colleges for the New Majority. Sheppard also co-authored an article with colleague Dr. Anthony Zaragoza, titled “Adult Education and Cooperative Entrepreneurialism at a Small, Urban, Public Liberal Arts College.” During her sabbatical she was a visiting lecturer at Ashesi University in Ghana. On the heels of being one of the 2017 Hedgebrook Fellows, Gilda was named a 2019 Artist Trust Fellow.

Sheppard continues to teach sociology courses at seven Washington State prisons. She is a Board member for Compassion Action Network, a member of the Village of Hope, and sponsor for the Black Prisoners’ Caucus

In 2020, after over a decade of work, Sheppard completed her feature length documentary Since I Been Down, which has been accepted at nine festivals–including the largest documentary festival in the US, DOC NYC, where the film was recently named a festival favorite. Together with former student, now colleague, Tonya Wilson and Kimonti Carter she has been on several panels for the film. Recently she was on a panel with Professor Emerita Angela Davis, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, and Director of Abolitionist Law Center Saleem Holbrook. Read more about the film at the Tacoma News Tribune and the Seattle Times.

Recently, Sheppard collaborated with staff and faculty colleagues, as well as Deans Therese Saliba and Marcia Tate Arunga, to bring Toshi Reagon to Evergreen for our Climate Justice Series.

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Dr. Anthony Zaragoza (he/him) is a founding member of the Resilience Studies Consortium (RSC), representing Evergreen-Tacoma in this nation-wide and (emerging international) network of universities working to advance “place-based” educational opportunities for undergraduate students from a diversity of backgrounds, passions, and bioregions. In this capacity he has given invited presentations on “Neoliberalism in the Neighborhood” at Kansas Wesleyan, Roosevelt University in Chicago, Tuskegee University in Alabama, and Western State University in Colorado. He also hosted the 2019 RSC National Conference at Evergreen-Tacoma.

Dr. Zaragoza is co-author, with Dr. Maria Isabel Morales, of a chapter titled “A Pedagogy of Human Dignity & Becoming Kin in the Classroom.” The chapter appears in the forthcoming Kinship: Science and Spirit in a World of Relations,edited by John Hausdoerffer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, & Gavin Van Horn through Chelsea Green. The article discusses the use of storytelling as a humanizing pedagogy that can develop interdisciplinary multi-modal knowledges as well as relationships of solidarity, as part of creating an effective learning community. Zaragoza is also co-author, with Dr. Gilda Sheppard, of “Adult Education and Cooperative Entrepreneurialism at a Small, Urban, Public Liberal Arts College” in the journal Liberal Education, Fall 2018.

Political economy storytelling was at the heart of an Upward Bound Arts and Literature class he co-taught with Nadine Tussey, as well as his Summer 2020 Class at Evergreen. Zaragoza recently presented at the faculty meeting on some of the class’s projects. The class also had a Cross-Campus Storyshare between an Evergreen storytelling class, Upward Bound, and an Environmental Justice course at Roosevelt University taught by Bethany Barrett. Along with Natasha Lemke, Dr. Zaragoza was also a planner and facilitator for the post-election Village-to-Village Collaboration between Pierce Community College and Evergreen-Tacoma, and is planning future quarterly collaborations. —
Elizabeth Williamson, Ph.D.
(pronouns: she/her)
Curriculum and Faculty Hiring Dean