KidoJan_20200820_Transcript.pdf

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Part of Jan Kido Oral History Interview

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Jan Kido
Interviewed by Anthony Zaragoza
The Evergreen State College oral history project
August 20, 2020
Final

Zaragoza: Good morning. We are here with Jan Kido, retired faculty of The Evergreen State College.
Welcome, Jan.
Kido: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be here.
Zaragoza: As we start, would you tell us about your early life, your childhood, your parents, your
upbringing? Tell us a little bit about your early life.
Kido: I was born on a pineapple plantation. It’s called the island of Lana’i in Hawai’i. The entire island
was a pineapple plantation owned by the Castle and Cook Corp. It was a great place to be a kid because
you could run around barefooted and not worry. There were not many automobiles, so it was a
wonderful place to be a child; a place to jump on your bike and go down into one of the gulches to pick
guava and passion fruit, the kind of purple passion fruit that grew wild in the islands. My goodness, I
cannot imagine doing that again!
Zaragoza: What years are we talking? Situate us in terms of time.
Kido: I was born in 1943. That era I was talking about was when I was very young. I would say I was
probably about seven, eight, nine, because by the time my dad decided to leave and move to urban
Honolulu, I was about 12 or 13.
Moving was huge because, while we had visited friends and relatives in Honolulu before, we had
never lived there. Oh, my goodness, the transition was quite an adventure. My younger brother and I
had to make new friends and figure out how to get to school, catch the city bus. What bus? On the
island of Lana’i, there were no buses. You walked or someone drove you to school. [laughing] So,
learning to live in the city was an adventure.
My parents were themselves born in Hawai’i. On my mother’s side of the family, her mother
was also born in Hawai’i. She could speak Japanese and could speak and understand Hawaiian. English
also came along after a while. My grandmother’s wedding license and certificate were all written in
Hawaiian. As a little girl, my grandmother was living in Honoka’a on the Big Island of Hawai’i, loving that
place and loving her friends. As a young woman, she was a real put-together lady. She only went to the

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fourth or fifth grade because that’s all the country school had. If you wanted more, you had to be driven
an hour or more into the town of Hilo.
Zaragoza: What language, Jan, did you all speak at home?
Kido: My mother spoke both English and Japanese and my dad spoke primarily English, but he also
spoke some Japanese. My brother and I both were part of the generation that was not encouraged to
learn Japanese, but we did learn to write in Japanese. When we were little, on the plantation, we would
go to Japanese language school. After our day in American school, we went to Japanese language
school. While we learned quite a bit, you must use it, or you lose it. My brother especially has lost a
good bit of what he learned in Japanese school, but somehow, probably because of my mother, I
retained more of the spoken Japanese than my brother did.
Zaragoza: What kind of work did your parents do?
Kido: My dad became an accountant, but as a young man, he worked in the pineapple fields and drove
a truck on Lan’ai. He was an intellectually curious guy. He went to Honolulu as a high school student at
McKinley High School on Oahu and decided that he wanted to be an accountant.
My mom, the fifth child of 10 children in her family, did not have the opportunity to go beyond
the eighth grade. She never minded that she couldn’t go on because in the mid- ‘30s, for many on the
plantation, that’s where school ended. But when her younger brothers and sisters, who were born on
the island of Lana’i, completed the 8th grade there was a high school, so they all went through high
school. She was very happy for them. She would sew the school trousers for her brothers, and they
never forgot her care.
Zaragoza: Jan, during your early life, were there any major events or turning points for you that had a
significant impact on who you would become?
Kido: Hmm. From the time we were in the elementary grades, our family always talked about college.
Even though many family members had not ever been to college, they valued education. The Japanese,
Chinese and Korean cultures deeply valued education and in the family’s conversations, a college
education was frequently “the” topic. It was planted in our minds – in mine and all of our cousins, as
well. It became an unquestioned assumption: “Of course you’re going to college.” So, it was not a
single event, rather it was years of family expectations and examples that shaped my thinking. My
younger aunts and uncles on my mom’s side completed college: four were teachers and one was an
attorney What I remember being a significant moment was when our family moved from the very rural,
close-knit community on the plantation to urban Honolulu. Honolulu is like LA. If you’re from the
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plantation, Honolulu looks and seems like LA. That was a big move, and it was interesting. On Lana’i
there were snack shops but no restaurants. My dad decided that my brother and I needed to learn to
eat in a restaurant. For quite a while, every Friday evening we would go to a different restaurant—they
weren’t the high-end places but rather they were neighborhood restaurants—and we learned to eat in a
restaurant—how to order, look at the menu and decide what you wanted, all of that. That was a big
transition for me. I know it was for my brother as well.
Zaragoza: During the early time, your rural time on Lanai, who were the other groups of peoples that
were around? There seemed to be a Japanese community as well as an Indigenous Hawaiian
community. What other groups of people lived on your island?
Kido: There were a few—not many—Chinese. Some—again, not many—Koreans. And there was a very
large contingent of Filipinos and a medium-sized contingent of Portuguese. There were also haole’s - we
call the Caucasians “haole”. You know that?
Zaragoza: Right.
Kido: Haoles were pretty much managerial. They ran the plantation and they had the administrative
jobs.
Zaragoza: Colonial relationship.
Kido: Oh, yes, absolutely. I discovered how unusual it was to have grown up on Lana’i when we
relocated to Honolulu. On the plantation we were made to live in ethnic camps. The Japanese lived in a
particular geographic space on the island and the Filipinos in another – these areas were known as
“camps”. The few Chinese and Korean families were interspersed but the haoles lived primarily up on
the town’s highest hill in their New-England-appearing homes. [laughing] We lived in plantation
houses, which were small, but it was wonderful. The Native Hawaiian people lived primarily on the
ranch north of the town and at the harbor south of the town. The Native Hawaiian families had been on
Lana’i since before the arrival of the plantation They were wonderful people who easily welcomed
many families. All of the Native and immigrant groups were wonderful.
I had a Filipino friend, Magdalena Dahong. She and I would go back and forth between each
other’s houses and eat differently. She learned to eat with chopsticks at our house. I ate with my right
hand at her house. It was great to learn about these differences as I was growing up! Over time, the
differences I encountered didn’t seem strange. Here’s another example, if you were walking by the
home of a Native Hawaiian family that you knew they would call out, “Oh, Come, come, come!” and you
would go in and join the family, whatever they were doing.

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The Filipino families were a little more—I would say Magdalena’s family was caring and warm,
but they did not forget what Japan did to the Philippines during WWII. It didn’t matter that I was
Japanese, but they were cautious with the general Japanese population on Lana’i. Magdalena and I
were very young, had no idea what that animosity was about. As young students, together in the only
public school on the island, we became close-knit friends, and we came to understand each other’s
differences. We thought the differences were both silly and cool, they were simply different. One
behavior shared by all—it didn’t matter where you were from or what family you were from, everybody
removed their shoes before entering anyone’s home. [laughing]
Zaragoza: Thinking about your major move from Lana’i to Honolulu, how did this change in terms of the
people and peoples that were around you? Did you notice a difference there as well?
Kido: The only difference that I did notice was the kind of environment that a city has. The pace is
different, and the homes are closer together. Schools were, for me, seemed far from home. I
remember that my Native Hawaiian friends on Lana’i had to catch the plantation bus up from the harbor
or down from the ranch, or somebody had to drive them to the school. Here we were now in Honolulu
and someone had to drive us to school the first couple of weeks, until we learned to catch the city bus.
But the people in the neighborhood and at school were all from immigrant families. There were
very few haoles in our Honolulu neighborhood. The families were predominately Asian and Native
Hawaiian because the neighborhood we lived in was just at the foot of Diamond Head. Many older
Native Hawaiian families owned land there for generations. In school there were Native Hawaiian,
Japanese, Chinese, Filipino students—groups that I had been familiar with from Lana’i. They were
different, though. The city folks were very different. Everything seemed to be more competitive, and
when you’re new to that style of interaction, you wish that you had one close friend that you could tell
anything to and not have to be so competitive. But we survived—I survived—and made the transition
pretty well.
Zaragoza: It sounds like Honolulu was quite segregated in terms of the haole white population and
everyone else. Was that your experience?
Kido: Yes and no. When we first moved to Honolulu it was evident where the haole neighborhoods
were. The managerial and professional class of haoles tended to live in a community called Manoa that
was peppered with many New England style homes. Another was an ocean side community called
Wailupe that had a haoles-only covenant with one exception, a Chinese family. Another ocean side
community was called Portlock. It was predominantly haole, with the estate of Henry J. Kaiser located
there. The Portlock development was accessible to Asian-Pacific Islanders who were wealthy enough to
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buy the land and build a home there. There was also a very high-end community called Wailai-Kahala
that was built on land that was still owned by the Bishop Estate. Because there was no exclusionary
covenant, if a non-white family had sufficient funds they were not prevented from building a home in
that community. The homes on that land could be owned by the people who built them, but they didn’t
own the land. In later times, Hawaii passed a law that people who lived in a home they built on leased
land could negotiate with the landowner to buy the land such that they’d own not only the house but
the land under the house as well.
Living in Honolulu, I saw haoles who lived in communities where housing costs were far above
what most people could afford. The non-haole communities were highly integrated and included lots of
different kinds of people. There was a lot of ethnic diversity that included Portuguese families and a
small number of haole families of modest means. Then there were communities where haoles had
anchored down.
As I was growing up, I was not at all surprised to see Asian, Portuguese, Native Hawaiian
electricians, carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics and other tradespeople. In my view of the world,
electricians and all tradespeople were people from our polyethnic community. My first trip to
“America” – the continent – made a jarring adjustment to my world view. My mother and I flew to San
Francisco. When we were in the San Francisco airport terminal we saw a haole man up on a ladder fixing
the lights high up on the ceiling. We looked at each other and said, “Ah! Look! There’s a haole man.
He’s an electrician!” I learned later on this trip that I had not recognized the kind of class and race
distinctions that I later studied. In the islands, where I believe almost all of the haoles lived up on the
mountain or in closed communities, you never saw them work in the trades.
Zaragoza: Was there much of a black population in Honolulu?
Kido: No, not a big one. There was a small population of African Americans who remained in Hawaii
after coming during WWII and the Korean Conflict with the military. There were people from Puerto
Rico as well as Mexico. The Puerto Rican families were “conscripted” to work on the various plantations.
King Kalaka’ua hired Mexican cowboys on the Big Island to teach the Hawaiian cowboys how to keep
and run cattle. The Mexican cowboys introduced many plants on the Big Island, like the large cactus
that we call “panini”. They also brought a tree with thorns called “keawe”in Hawaiian. Both the panini
and keawe were the bane of children’s romps on the beaches, especially the keawe thorns!
The Mexican cowboys set up the smooth flow of cattle on the Big Island’s Parker Ranch. The
Hawaiian cowboys learned to ride herd on the cattle; how to use a special rope to tie the cattle as they

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branded them; learned how to brand cattle; how to calve newborn calves. A food item that has become
an island favorite was also introduced - beef jerky.
Zaragoza: Research shows that it was also Mexican caballeros who were also teaching Anglos—white
folks—in the U.S. west as well, both in terms of farming dry lands and in terms of ranching, etc. There’s
quite a literature on the caballeros and their teaching of whites on this continent as well.
Kido:

I didn’t know that. Of course they would. After all, the Mexican cattle ranchers were in the

West under Spanish land grants before white folks arrived.
Zaragoza: Let’s move on to college a little bit. Tell me about your college experience that had been very
ingrained in you from an early age. What do you go on to study? Where did you go to school? How was
your experience?
Kido: My destination was the University of Hawaii at Manoa, their Honolulu campus. I went to the
University of Hawaii and became a student in the College of Education. I remember wanting to be an
engineer, as well. Culturally, though, it was a big deal for my parents that I become a teacher because in
the Japanese community teachers were respected and admired. They thought that would be just the
best career for me. My aunts and uncles also encouraged me to become a teacher.
After some intense family discussions, I did apply to the College of Education. I did the four
years—five years actually because I did an extra year to obtain a professional certification. It was
disturbing to reflect on that teacher education experience in graduate school after three years of
teaching in a public high school. The education program that I had experienced did not do anything
about the culturally diverse community in all the public schools in Hawaii. There was no recognition of
the different cultural values that we experienced in our earlier elementary schools. We had learned
about each other’s cultures as we became friends, etc. But the teachers being prepared at the Univ. Of
Hawaii School of Education were never encouraged to think about looking at the student population
from that inter-cultural perspective.
Naively, it didn’t dawn on me to consider that until graduate school in conversation with the
ethnically diverse group of colleagues who were in my Master of Arts in Communication program. None
had been a teacher, but they wanted to do research in speech-communication; some for business and
industry, some for international non-profit work, and three of us for teaching. It was eye-opening that th
the UH teacher preparation program did not include teaching our culturally diverse student population
from a culturally relevent perspective. My focus in graduate school was “multicultural interactions”.
The faculty in the Speech-Communication Dept at UH-Manoa viewed such study as “cross-cultural
communication”, as they observed what takes place when people from different cultures interact.
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That was just so stimulating, and it did not surprise me that many teachers were still functioning
with the general notion of a student. No questions about students’ backgrounds, except all the biases
that come with growing up and hearing stories. No real effort to understand. Now, though, in 2020,
the University of Hawaii College of Education on Oahu has a very strong and thoughtful—very
thoughtful—program that includes the study of the various cultures in Hawaii’s public schools and the
culturally responsive approaches to bring to the cross-cultural learning environment.
The College of Education was required to expand the background of the students who were
accepted to the college’s K-12 public school that the college ran and that served as the site for testing
the ideas of the Curriculum and Instruction faculty. Prior to the mid-70’s, most of the students at that
school were children of doctors, attorneys, members of the state Legislature, college professors and
wealthy businessmen. Very few students came from families who were not college educated. The
Legislature required the college to open its public school to all kinds of students, whatever their
background. It was required to be more diverse than it had been.
Their curriculum needed to better reflect the needs of and opportunities for Hawai’i’s diverse
population. The curriculum did change, and I did not benefit from that. Later in my doctoral studies, I
read about a number of researchers at the UH College of Education who worked with and used the
research of Lev Vygotsky in their thinking about teaching and learning. It was a welcome change!
Understanding about Zone of Proximal Development and other aspects of Vygotsky’s work was fertile
ground for research. I remember referring to that research when I was Director and faculty in
Evergreen’s the MiT program, as well. In one two year cycle we had Vygotsky’s text as required primary
source reading. There were other curricular adaptations, as well.
In my early college years, 1961-1965, I encountered some surprising requirements of the College
of Education. If you were going to be a teacher, you had to pass an oral English exam. That was
evidence of the “classist” imposition on students in the College at that time. Are you familiar with the
local dialect that Hawaii’s people speak?
Zaragoza: Is it what often gets referred to as “pidgin”?
Kido: Yes.
Zaragoza: I can’t claim any familiarity, but I have heard of it and I have heard it spoken.
Kido: I’m glad you know about it! The College of Education decided that none of its graduates and
none of its teachers would speak Hawai’ian pidgin when they went to their classroom to teach. All
teacher candidates had to go before a board of faculty and deliver an extemporaneous speech. You
were given a topic and you needed to create a brief speech. If you your spoken English did not pass that
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test, you couldn’t be a teacher. You needed to pass that test. Sometimes students were put back a year
sometimes and made to go through that terrible trial many times. There was one person that I knew
who had to repeat that test three times, and it was awful. The emotional, psychological experience was
horrible.
To reestablish our self-confidence, I can remember laughing with the other teacher candidates
about one of Hawaii’s first Congressional senators, when Hawai’i became a state. One of the senators
elected was an older Chinese man. He was a very, very influential and wealthy Chinese banker as well
as a real estate speculator, who spoke terrific “pidgin” and represented us in the United States Senate.
[laughing] We all said in “pidgin”, “You know, what you going do?” That was a period when the
imposition of cultural biases was very clear.
Zaragoza: It seems that the dominant framework is assimilation.
Kido: Oh, my goodness, yes. While there were deep and valued cultural practices of the first
immigrants from my ethnic group (issei) which were maintained into the second generation (nissei),
many of these practices were not retained by the descendants in the third (sansei) and fourth (yonsei)
generation.
Zaragoza: And you were being trained to teach assimilation essentially.
Kido: Oh, absolutely. You know, children really are a lot smarter than their teachers. While in class,
students may be doing assigned tasks but, oh my goodness, outside the classroom students made fun of
the unusual way that the teacher wanted work done. At home we’d tell our parents that it didn’t make
sense to do it like the teacher said.
I think that over time, because of what was happening on the mainland with regard to ethnic
studies, that became a big influence on curriculum and pedagogy in Hawaii, as well. In the late ‘60’s a
publishing house called Bamboo Ridge Press was organized by young writers who were born and raised
in Hawaii, had gone to college all across the country and came home. They were not able to get their
writing, which focused on their ethnic group experiences, published by traditional presses so they got
together and established their own publishing house, Bamboo Ridge. In their writing, they describe the
kinds of pressure that many local people felt from the dominant culture.
Zaragoza: After you graduate college and graduate school, what is your first job out of graduate school?
Where do you go from your education?
Kido: I went to teach at a four year high school across the mountain on the island of Oahu. It was not in
the urban core, but over the mountain and down into a town called Kaneohe. Castle High School had a
significant population of Native Hawaiian and Portuguese students. The school drew from old Hawaiian
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communities that were still there, and families who had been there for generations. Because the
Portuguese had been brought in to be overseers on the plantation—they were called “luna” - the
persons who managed the sugar and pineapple plantation field operations.
Zaragoza: What we would call the driver.
Kido: The driver. Ah, okay, I don’t know that term.
Zaragoza: Like on plantations in the U.S. South.
Kido: Oh, they were called drivers?
Zaragoza: Yeah.
Kido: Oh, I did not know that.
Zaragoza: Slave driver.
Kido: Okay, yeah. The Portuguese “luna” and their families, over the many generations, came to see
themselves as Pacific Asian Islander people. They did not see themselves as Caucasian. If you even said
to a Portuguese person that they were Caucasian—“Oh, you’re a haole”—they would be so offended,
you’s be in a fight. They decided they were not haole. That was interesting, what identity formation on
the plantation produced. Because the lunas’ children went to public schools and they mixed with the
population there on the island, they learned about each other’s differences and formed lasting
friendships. So, the lunas had their responsibilities for oversight, but their kids were learning about
cultural differences from other children in the local community. I think that our generation, post WWII,
had a powerful opportunity to get to know and understand why people were different, and that it was
okay that they were different.
So, my first job teaching at Castle High School was powerful because there were so many things
that I had been taught about teaching that I had to put aside. Rather I needed to use what I understood
from my own life experiences about those polyethnic students. It was fun and good to have done that. I
was teaching with a woman from Texas who was married to a Native Hawaiian man. She also genuinely
understood what was going on among the students, as she had observed and learned from her own
mixed race children.
In our team-teaching situation we decided in my communication class the students would do
West Side Story, and in her English class, the students would do Romeo and Juliet. There we were with
an opportunity to do an integrated, interdisciplinary class. At that time the high school had some
federal funds that allowed us to set up a TV studio and students were live-broadcasting stories and
school news. With the help of the video-studio faculty member we arranged to videotape scenes from
West Side Story. We didn’t have musicians or any music—just the script for the sections of the play that
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the students had eagerly discussed as they compared and contrasted Romeo and Juliet with West Side
Story. We did try-outs, staging and rehearsals. They thought the project was the best thing ever. It’s
not something that I think I would have done based on my teacher education program. We would have
read the script, we might even have done a dramatic reading, but the depth of understanding they
gained from their experience of reading and discussion; making a connection to their own lives;
embodying the characters in West Side Story and having that videotaped; putting it on TV and seeing
themselves in the playback, thrilled them. They were ready to do more.
It was something that they remembered, and when those students graduated, the Vietnam War
was on. These high school young men went off to war. Some came back, and when they came back,
they came to see my teaching partner and me. They were tearful about the war, but happy to be home
and to be talking to their teachers. They told us things that were very painful. Very, very painful. Like
“You know, when we were there, we were shooting at people who looked just like me.” They had to do
that, and it was tearful conversation about what they had experienced.
Zaragoza: Teachers really need to learn from our students.
Kido: Oh, absolutely. I think that the kind of freedom that Evergreen offers its faculty to design and
develop—creatively, thoughtfully—integrated team programs give students these kinds of
opportunities.
Zaragoza: I wanted to ask, how long did you teach at this high school, and then where did you go from
there? Then let’s talk about you moving into Evergreen.
Kido: Okay. I taught at that school for four years. Then I went to the University of Hawaii for graduate
school in ’69, ’70, ’71. At the end of graduate studies, I joined the faculty in the Speech Communication
Department at the University of Hawaii. I was there for three years, teaching and administering the alluniversity required course in Communication. I then went to the Big Island to the University of Hawaii at
Hilo—Hawaii Community College there—and that’s the sequence before I came to Evergreen.
Zaragoza: What are some highlights of your time in Hilo – the prime of your pre-Evergreen career.
You must have done so much during that period. What are some of the major things that you were
able to accomplish during that time in Hilo?
Kido: We, as a group of faculty in the liberal arts at HCC, were really advocates for providing the kind of
teaching and the learning environment so that our students would feel confident to go forward into a
bachelor’s degree program. We encouraged them to go on. We weren’t super successful all the time,
but there were many opportunities to be creative.

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In Hilo, on the Big Island, I had an opportunity to both teach and do some administrative work. I
became the Chair of the Liberal Arts faculty. In addition to the arts and sciences, the chair also had
responsibilities for the Nursing Associate degree, the Fire Fighter’s Associate degree, the Early Childhood
Associate degree, and the Administration of Justice Associate degree.
We were this big conglomeration of programs, and I noticed that the faculty in the liberal arts
seemed not to be so invigorated by their teaching. They seemed to be flagging. I knew them all to be
wonderful people because they were the ones who welcomed me when I first arrived. I began to
investigate what kinds of things I might do to help revitalize their motivation. In reading all of the
journals that crossed my desk, I came across a journal article that described a school in Florida that had
adopted something called “learning communities” based on the work that was being done at a school in
Olympia, WA, The Evergreen State College. I thought, really? The faculty at that Florida school were so
enthusiastic. So much had changed for the learners. The students were the most enthusiastic kids on
that campus.
I looked further into “learning communities” and The Evergreen State College. One of the
references that I had was Alexander Astin, who was a faculty in higher education at UCLA or Berkeley.
Astin had written a book about excellence in higher education. He cited Evergreen as an outstanding
place for students to be learning and interacting with each other and with the faculty. He even
compared Evergreen to Harvard. There were full time faculty, not part time lecturers but full time
faculty teaching incoming freshmen. There were no graduate students. He had an amazing description
of what was going on at Evergreen.
I continued to look around. I needed to have approval for spending funds to do more to find out
about learning communities. As it happened, the Chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo at that
time was Edward Kormondy. Ed Kormondy had been Evergreen’s first Provost. When I shared with him
that I was really interested in the “learning community” concept, he said, “Oh, why don’t you write to
them? Use my name. Tell them where you are and use my name.” So, I did. I wrote to Evergreen, used
his name, and...wow... they sent me boxes of sample thematic programs that learning community
faculty had taught.
Zaragoza: What year is this, Jan, just so we can get situated? Is it mid-‘80s, late ‘80s?
Kido: Mid-‘80s, probably about ’86-’87. Getting that information from Evergreen was just amazing. I
couldn’t understand everything that I was looking at, but it was exciting and so creative. One of the
Evergreeners, Jean MacGregor and her husband, faculty member, Rob Cole, were planning to vacation
in Hawaii. She is one of the people who had sent me that box of information. She said, “We’re coming
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to Hawaii for a holiday, and if you’d like me to come and meet with your faculty, I can do that. For one
day, I can do that.”
We made all of the arrangements. She came that one day, and we got turned on. It was
wonderful to see the faculty light up. [laughing] When you’ve seen them looking tired and flagging
energy, it was wonderful to see them light up.
I then did a follow-up with Jean. I took her to see our Provost and she is the one who asked the
Provost, “You know, we could do an exchange where a faculty from Evergreen would come here and
teach your faculty and acquaint them with learning communities, and how they might do it, and create
this kind of teaching and learning environment, and someone from Hawaii would come to Evergreen.”
The Provost thought it was a great idea, and so did I. I’m thinking, “Oh, you know, people would
want to go. They’ll want to go just for a little while.” Well, we got it all set up and nobody—none of our
faculty—wanted to go to Washington, so I had to volunteer to go! I stepped out of that administrative
role and became a two-year exchange faculty at Evergreen.
Betsy Diffendal - a cultural anthropologist - was the first exchange faculty who came to Hawaii.
She was followed by a whole bunch of other people. Michael Beug—he was a biologist—wanted to take
his family to Hawaii and be an exchange faculty, so he did for a semester—Hawaii CC is on semesters.
Then came York Wong, a political scientist/computer technician, Rob Knapp, a physicist, Stephanie
Coontz, a sociologist. They all wanted to come to Hawaii on exchange, and nobody on the HCC faculty
wanted to go, so I had to stay in Washington to teach in order for them to go. [laughing]
It was good to have had that experience to see how the college operated and what kinds of
things could be done. But the tricky part was how to do learning communities in the standard college
bureaucratic structure. You know this. At Evergreen, we don’t say, “You’re going to have three credits
in Sociology, three credits in History, three credits in Anthropology” if you have that interdisciplinary
mix. But the computers at HCC that did all the registration couldn’t do that. The computers were
programmed to have students register for specific courses with a specific number of credits at the start
of each semester...they couldn’t wait to see what the credit breakout would be at the end of the
semester.
Betsy was the one who helped the faculty in Hawaii figure out how to do that. In our first such
program we had a psychologist/dance faculty, a Native Hawaiian studies/sociology faculty and Betsy, an
anthropologist team teaching together in a learning community called, Ho’o’ulu’mao ...”To grow
continually”. They got together and talked about the kinds of credits they would generate. I gave the

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credits course names that the registrar would understand. It was a real challenge to work with the
Registrar, but we worked it out.
The Hawaii faculty had a wonderful interdisciplinary learning experience. The students in that
program wanted to do more with them. The students had a depth of exposure to Native Hawaiian
culture and local history that they never imagined they would have had in college. It was stunning.
They had the opportunity to discover a cultural anthropological view of that authentic Native Hawaiian
culture and examined the cultural practices and values and spiritual sites on the island with a Native
Hawaiian sociologist. They also considered their own diverse cultural identities with the psychologist.
Oh, they were thrilled - a very happy crew!
But it would be fair to say that the college—the University of Hawaii at Hilo—the baccalaureate
degree programs —had difficulty imagining they would do team teaching with an interdisciplinary
curriculum. But we did convince the theater person—drama—and the English faculty – literature - to try
to do a learning community. They did and students loved it. That was the beginning of my “transition”
and was so happy to be able to introduce collaboratively taught learning communities to the faculty
there in Hilo.
Zaragoza: Jan, how did your expectations of Evergreen meet up with and match up with these first
experiences during these two years of exchange?
Kido: I was astonished that the faculty had enormous freedom to create whole interdisciplinary
programs. By the time I came on board full time, 1991, most of the early faculty had transformed their
thinking about teaching only within their discipline. When you’re fresh out of your PhD, you expect to
teach all that you ever learned about math, or whatever is your discipline. But I learned a great deal
about interdisciplinary learning communities from the experienced TESC faculty with whom I taught. It
was wonderful to see the full time faculty teaching creatively teaching undergraduate students, .
I attribute the ongoing support of learning communities to Barbara Smith She was a great
Provost. She would explain things and could disagree with you, but not hold anything you said against
you. You could argue and disagree with her and never worry about whether she would be less
supportive because you didn’t agree with her. She was so calm and enthusiastic about the kinds of
things the faculty can do. When she had to say, “No, you can’t do that one,” “You can’t do this,” or,
“You shouldn’t do that,” it was not to assert control but to maintain and promote the kind of teaching
and learning that the college had established. The “no” had to do with a strategy that seriously didn’t fit
in with the philosophy of the school.

13

Having worked with other provosts, I thought that Barbara was an amazing provost. She
worked with a woman president, Jane Jervis, who was also an astonishing college president. I can tell
you a story about that.
Zaragoza: If you’d like to tell the story, please do.
Kido: Okay. When I was Director of the Master in Teaching program, there was a graduation
ceremony—I forget what year that was— when the students who chose their guest speaker —an
outside speaker—chose Mumia Abdul Jamal.
Zaragoza: I’ve been following Mumia as a journalist for a long time, since graduate school.
Kido: There was a big reaction by some on campus when the students chose Mumia. The wife of the
police officer who Mumia had been convicted of killing, wrote to the college and said, “You shouldn’t
have him there!” Because of the college’s belief that students should have a say about their own
graduation exercises they did not cancel the speaker.
President Jervis responded to her, explaining what and why this was happening at the college because we were genuine advocates of free speech and the students had the responsibility to invite
their own graduation speaker. She wrote a beautiful and thoughtful letter to the wife of the police
officer, copies of which she sent to the faculty. Thereafter she heard that there would be national news
reporters on the campus on graduation day because the officer’s wife said she would attend, standing
with policemen. They wouldn’t interfere, but they would be there.
There were students who disagreed with the decision to allow Mumia to speak. When she
opened the ceremonies, President Jervis respectfully invited students who disagreed with the selection,
to demonstrate their disapproval. One of the things that they could do was to leave their seats for the
speech and return after Mumia had spoken. Another option was to stand where they were and turn
their backs to the stage. There were students who walked away and students who stood among the
graduates with their backs turned to the stage. There was no conflict, no shouts of opposition, rather
respectful demonstration of fearless opposition.
Later, someone informed Jane Jervis that they heard newscasters say, “There’s no story here.
Nothing’s happening.” So, we weren’t part of the national news. The graduates, when the graduation
ceremony was over, stood, turned and applauded the police officer’s wife. I’m not sure how it would
have turned out with a President and a Provost who felt more threatened by the situation. They both
had deep leadership skills, valued effective communication, respected the students voice and they
genuinely advocated for the philosophy of the college. That was a wonderful learning experience for all
attendees.
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Zaragoza: Jan, how do you make your transition from being an exchange faculty from Hilo to being a
fulltime Evergreen faculty? Can you tell us a little bit about that transition?
Kido: I had not intended to become a faculty member at Evergreen. I saw myself as a space holder for
the college’s faculty exchange program. As a long term exchange faculty, I participated in programs at
several campuses affiliated with TESC’s Washington Center. Barbara Smith sent me to Seattle Central
Community College and North Seattle Community College where I worked with faculty who had been on
exchange at Evergreen and had experienced learning communities. They were enthusiastic about their
experience and were supporting it at their colleges. They were going to train me up and share with me
the kind of experience they had had, and appreciated at TESC.
After those two experiences, I was assigned to TESC’s Olympia campus. There was a need in the
evolving undergraduate teacher education program when one of it’s faculty members left the team.
Barbara Smith asked if I could step into this program that was already underway. I did, and I found that
my background was well suited to the team and student needs. It was a role that took advantage of my
academic background in group communication and my cross-cultural interests in the differences in how
individuals see and understand the world around them. The new team and the students worked well
together and were interested, committed and inclusive as we worked through the remainder of the
year.
At he end of that year, the Director of the undergraduate program, John Parker, decided that he would
step out of his administrative role and step into the role of faculty member on the first team of the
new graduate education program. John Parker, Barbara Smith, Rita Pougiales and, I believe, Sherry
Walton, Stephanie Kozick, and Yvonne Peterson, had been planning a graduate-level teacher education
program. Evergreen started a graduate program because the State Legislature decided that all
Washington State teachers needed a graduate degree—master’s degree—to start teaching. Of course,
the legislature changed that law after many colleges added or changed their programs, as we
changed TESC’s program from an undergraduate to a graduate program. In any case, John was going to
step down after having led the design of that innovative master’s program and wanted to teach in it.
The
two-year long program integrated K-12 teacher education using Evergreen’s learning community model.

15

John Parker also wrote a successful proposal to the Pew Charitable Trusts. However, by the end
of the winter quarter, John learned that he had pancreatic cancer and needed to stop all that he was
doing. He and Sherry Walton asked me if I would be interested in applying for the MIT Director’s
position because John didn’t see himself coming back. He knew what I had been doing in Hawaii.
Zaragoza: Let’s just take a five-minute stretch break, and then we can come back to your beginning the
MiT program.
Kido: All right.
Zaragoza: We were talking about John Parker and him stepping aside and your beginning to take over
the MiT program.
Kido: John Parker was very inspired. He wanted Evergreen’s Teacher Education program to produce
teachers who would know and be interested in research; who could get together and produce their own
publication and who would be prepared to develop the thinking and learning skills of the diverse
student population in Washington’s urban and rural areas. The Pew Charitable Trusts supported his
ideas.
When John left Evergreen, the grant was still active. Fortunately wee were able to adjust the
grant objectives when we consulted the Pew Trusts Program Office who was monitoring our grant . She
approved our idea to locate the MiT program for a two-year cycle on the urban Tacoma Campus to
address the State’s anxiety that so many students of color had access to so few teachers of color. We
needed to figure a way that we could attract and recruit more students of color to that MIT program in
Tacoma, including both Tacoma Program graduates, as well as other local students of color interested in
teaching.
With funding from the Pew Grant we hired Ms. Marcily Brown, a Tacoma Campus graduate, in
1994. She was a wonderful, culturally sensitive and thoughtful person who helped us recruit and advise
students of color from the Tacoma Campus and elsewhere. Applicants needed to have a bachelor’s
degree before they could be considered. Ms. Brown advised the current Tacoma students about the
kinds of coursework they needed to meet requirements. The target populations for recruitment
included community college graduates, paraeducators in Tacoma schools, as well as the students at the
Tacoma Campus. The result was astonishing. We had the most outstanding and racially diverse group of
students we’d ever admitted.
I could just scream at how wonderful the student population in the Master in Teaching program
was when WE did the recruitment, when WE went out, reached out, and found people; helped them by
making sure that that’s what they really wanted to do—to teach—and that they had the qualifications
16

that the State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction had set out for each field and level of
teaching.
When we were finished with the recruitment, Marcily smartly looked for positions available in the
community and applied for a position on the advising staff of the UW-Tacoma. While there, she was so
skilled and effective that she became the Chancellor’s eye on the Tacoma community. Marcily had an
excellent time with our program and did wonderful work at UW-Tacoma. She passed away two years
ago and had remained in contact with the MIT students that she had recruited for almost 20 years. They
would call her and let her know how they’re doing.
Because she stayed in touch with them, Marcily knew things like when one of the graduates
was chosen for the Milken Award in 2001. That was Betty Williams, a Tacoma Campus graduate and a
1996 MIT graduate. Betty is an African American woman who taught middle school in Tacoma and was
recognized for her excellent work with her diverse students. The Milken Educator Award of $25,000 can
be used for whatever the recipient decides. There were several other students whose professional
successes were reported to us. .
Another graduate of that class, an African American woman, Denise Johnson, had taught for
some years then decided that she wanted to become a principal. She entered that professional
certification path and she became a very successful principal.
Yet another student, of mixed race background, Wayne Au, was in the 1996 MIT program and
had graduated from Evergreen in Olympia. He was seriously committed to becoming a teacher. His goal
was to be a teacher whose work was guided by the issues he cared about: social justice, racial justice
and equity in education. While in the MIT program, he also was working with the publication Rethinking
Schools, a respected publication where, in later years, he became an editor.
After some years of teaching in a high school he decided he wanted to have greater impact on
teacher education programs and that more needed to be done with regard to cross-cultural issues,
social justice and the whole notion of culturally responsive teaching. At the University of Wisconsin,
Wayne completed his PhD, returned to Washington State and was hired by the University of
Washington-Bothell campus as faculty in their education program.
In 2009, while serving as an editor at Rethinking Schools, Wayne edited a book of articles,
including his own writing, about the kinds of cross-cultural issues that teachers needed to be alert to,
aware of and include in their social studies curriculum. That book had an impact on Michael Bennett, a
former football player with the Seattle Seahawks, and Macklemore, a Seattle hip-hop artist, who were
so impressed that together they bought sufficient copies to present to all Seattle school social studies
17

teachers. Wayne is currently an administrator at the UW Bothell campus, and he has had a positive,
substantive impact on public education.
Zaragoza: You were the first Director of MiT.
Kido: Yes, of the Master’s level program.
Zaragoza: Do you want to talk about that, the early years of MiT and its structure, and what were some
of the things that you all did in the inauguration of the Master in Teaching program at Evergreen?
Kido: The very first cohort was a combination cohort. Part of the cohort were finishing up their work of
the final two-year undergraduate program as the master’s program was beginning. The two programs
shared the winter quarter of 1991 but had different emphases- the students in the undergrad program
were reflecting on their fall student teaching and focused on what they needed to improve before spring
teaching. The first students in the Master’s level program were in their second quarter of the first year
focused on educational theory.
The challenge of that first MIT year was that the faculty team teaching the final part of the
undergraduate program - Rita Pougiales, Bill Arney and Stephanie Kozik – were also responsible for
teaching the first year of the MIT program simultaneously. They divvied up the different areas of
responsibility that each program required. Fortunately, the central issues of what effective teaching is,
teaching strategies, and how to think creatively and in an expansive way, were common for both
cohorts.
The faculty team was successful; they produced interesting graduates, some of whom I visited
in the first year that I was Director. After they graduated, I visited them in their schools. They were
doing well. They were frustrated that often they weren’t able to be as creative as they had learned how
they could be; that the rules of the school building as well as the Department of Education too often
didn’t allow for as much experiential learning as they had learned to do. But I think they were successful
in adapting their strategies to the requirements.
Zaragoza: How did the structure of MiT compare at Evergreen to other similar programs around the
state?
Kido: There were no programs like the one at Evergreen. Our elementary, middle and high school
teaching candidates were learning together in the same cohort. The structure was like a learning
community at Evergreen, that is, you had your faculty and they worked as a team and had different
kinds of skills and knowledge to contribute. Stephanie Kozick was great at developing workshops. Rita
Pougiales was an anthropologist with a progressive view of education. Stephanie was the only one who
had taught in an elementary, middle or high school. Bill
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Arney, a sociologist, focused on a Socratic approach. They divided the responsibilities to do sessions
specific to the elementary, middle school and high school interest groups.
Unlike all of the other graduate education programs in the state, ours was a two-year graduate
program. The teaching program, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, were structured as
two year programs. That has been an issue at the college and I understand that it has been modified.
Evergreen’s administration changed the structure of the program. The faculty and administrative team
who created the original program designed the first year as the foundation of theory and field
observations of public school classrooms, reflecting on their observations and discussing and writing
about what they saw. They read Jean Piaget, John Dewey and others. One cycle they read Socrates’
Meno but they had trouble seeing its relationship to teaching at first! The Spring Quarter of year one
included the assignment to begin their research paper as a literature review on an area of teaching or
learning that was of keen interest to them.
The second year was one quarter of full time independent student teaching with a classroom
teacher as a coach and monitor. The cooperating teacher had to agree to turn over their classroom to
the student teacher for the quarter, and the students were responsible for developing their curriculum
and enacting their plans. Fortunately, we were able to find teachers willing to mentor a student
teacher. The MIT faculty team visited each student three times during the quarter, more often if there
were problems or if the student teacher requested it. The students were required to submit their lesson
plans to their faculty observer who sat and observed and recorded what they saw and heard. At the
conclusion of the lesson the student teachers met with their faculty to debrief the class. If time didn’t
allow for an immediate debrief, the faculty arranged a phone debrief for that evening. Each faculty
member convened a weekly seminar with their students. Seminars, by necessity, were held in the
evening one day each week. Student teachers were placed predominantly in schools along the I-5
corridor, north and south of Olympia. The driving distances required by each faculty’s student
placements were sometimes quite challenging. Now and then, I, as the Director, would supervise a
student, for example, at a placement in Portland, OR or in the Methow Valley when it was unreasonable
for a faculty team member.
In the winter quarter of the second year, students returned to campus. They were to complete
their Master’s paper, a literature review. Rather than experimental research, they did a deep review of
the literature on the issue that they had earlier identified. They had access to the materials at the
University of Washington library, and via the computer, they were able to access national journal

19

articles. They were to scan the research on their topics, identify the concepts that had been supported
by more than one researcher, and provide an analysis of the efficacy of the research conclusions.
That winter quarter was intense and exhausting because they needed to submit their Master’s
project for faculty review by the end of the quarter. If they met the project’s targets, they were a step
closer to being recommended as candidates for teacher certification. In addition they had a full schedule
of on-campus classes focused on responding to the feedback on their student teaching and working to
improve their skills for their final student teaching quarter in the spring.
The spring quarter was their final full-time student teaching opportunity - the time when the
student teachers put everything on the line and were encouraged to do their very best to demonstrate
their learning and to reflect on their teaching strategies and their effectiveness. In this final quarter
they were expected to function as teacher candidates without the mentoring of the classroom teacher.
Many of them were astonishing, as I learned later from a high school principal. He was from a nearby
school district and said that one of the things that he likes about Evergreen graduates from the MIT
Program is they were so much more mature. They were like teachers who had already taught for a year.
He wasn’t too far off the mark since all of the MIT students had had two quarters of full time student
teaching.
The structure held for quite some time. The enrollment went up and down depending upon the
economic circumstances in the country. When the economy roared, our recruitment was not as
successful. When the economy was down, we got students like Boeing engineers who decided they
wanted to change what they were doing, so applied to our program. We had a number of people from
Boeing—one engineer, one from their business division, and I can’t remember what the other one did.
In any case, we were able to connect with those people.
The college didn’t do recruiting for the MiT program. We needed to reach out and connect with
people ourselves. It was a bit challenging since we had no staff assigned to do recruiting and we weren’t
able to do more hiring. When you think about who might be likely candidates, knowing that the starting
salary of a teacher was significantly different than the starting salary of a businessperson, finding
candidates was always challenging. It was our good fortune that there were mature people who had
been working and who felt that they would rather be a teacher than continue with their current job.
We benefited from folks seeking a career change.
As of the Spring Quarter of 2021, the program structure has changed. I don’t know what they’re
doing or how they’re doing it. I know it’s been reduced from two years. I do understand that it was
difficult and expensive for students and the college to have a two year Master’s program. The initial
20

program planning group understood that to do effective teaching for “other people’s children”, as Lisa
Delpit emphasized, they must understand conceptual learning and have time to experiment with
approaches to concept development in a classroom. We resisted reducing the length of the program
because teaching America’s diverse public school students requires a strong knowledge base, culturally
responsive approaches and considerable skill development.
One of the difficulties of doing anything that’s different and unexpected is that there will be
resistance. Our students did have resistance to ideas that were novel to them or that they already had
an opinion about, and they weren’t going to change. Faculty member, Sonja Weidenhaupt developed a
workshop on “belief perseverance”. The impact was astonishing - when our students saw that they
themselves persisted in a belief, despite all the contradictory evidence, the facts—scientific facts—that
they were presented with, they still held fast to their beliefs. It was a great lesson for them all and for us
as well about what we need to be alert to about the prior learning of our learners and ourselves. There
will be people in our classes who will resist learning something new, or something contrary to their
beliefs.
That was an important turning point in their thinking. Yes, there would be times as teachers
when they would need to introduce something beyond common knowledge - a different way of looking
at an issue, a concept, or a theme. They needed to be prepared to support their students in the
acquisition of that new understanding by thoughtful, intentional scaffolding or “building steps” to
transform their thinking about a new idea.
That first, intense year of working with theories—trying them out, developing ideas, trying out
different structures to take into their classrooms— was critical, in my view. That never happened for me
when I was in the teacher education program in Hawaii.
The second year’s focus on student teaching was, in my view, very important. Many student
teachers have a difficult time in their first quarter of student teaching because it’s their first effort.
Some of the MIT students did fabulously well in their first quarter of student teaching. For those who did
not, it was OK because they had the winter quarter to reflect on their experience and take a close look
at what they did. What would they change? How would they bring that about?
When, in the Winter quarter of year two, a student couldn’t do deep the reflection called for to
improve their practice, we still let some of them go into their second student teaching, with an alert
from the faculty that they were in danger of not being ready for certification. In my years as Director of
the MIT Program there were two students who did not successfully complete the program and were
counseled out.
21

Zaragoza: Jan, when did you step down as the Director of MiT? How long did you stay in that role?
Kido: I think it was five years. I began September 1991 and finished my fourth year - 1994-95- working
in the Fall half-time with MIT and half teaching at the Tacoma Campus. In the Fall quarter we had hired
Michael Vavrus as the next Director and I stayed on half-time to acquaint him with how our program
operated.
Zaragoza: Then what did you do at Evergreen? You stayed at Evergreen. What was your next chapter
of Evergreen?
Kido: In the winter and spring of 1996, I taught at the Tacoma Campus full time and was so impressed
and could see why we were successful in recruiting some of their graduates to the MIT program for that
special cycle that the Tacoma Campus hosted from 1994-1996.
Zaragoza: Who did you work with at Tacoma, Jan?
Kido: Oh, Sherry Walton from the MiT program also joined the Tacoma Campus that spring quarter. It
was Sherry Walton, Joye Hardiman, Betsy Diffendal, Artee Young, Willie Parson, Anthony Reynolds and
Alberta Canada. In a program called Beyond Dichotomies.
Zaragoza: Jan, I’m especially curious to know what your experiences were at Evergreen as a woman of
color teaching on a predominantly white campus in Olympia?
Kido: First of all, coming from Hawaii, I didn’t know that there was a category called “a person of color”.
I was just a person. In Hawaii, if you were born and raised in the islands, you’re “local”. All of the
immigrant groups—the Filipinos, the Portuguese, the Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Korean, Japanese—along
with Native Hawaiians are “local”. There is not a category called “person of color”.
However, there is a separate category for Caucasian immigrants – “haoles” - because the
Hawaiian community has retained their objection to the colonization of their island nation by haoles.
Many socio-cultural aspects in Hawaii have been done to respond to colonization. The University of
Hawaii has a Native Hawaiian studies program that’s huge. The program has its own identity as a
“school” among the Univ. Of Hawaii’s other academic “schools”.
For me, being thought of as a “person of color” was such a novel, funny and strange category.
Person of color? Never thought of myself as that. Always thought of myself as a Japanese woman from
Hawaii. In the vernacular of Hawaii, you’re a “local girl”, you’re a “local boy”. As I grew older in Hawaii,
being a woman, and going back to visit my family with all of my sprouting gray hair, I’d get off the plane
and there would be a local boy who would say, “Oh, Auntie! Let me carry that for you.” Here’s this notJapanese boy, but a local boy, who respectfully called me “auntie” and helped me with my luggage.

22

That shift in the kind of relationship that existed for me in Hawaii,without having had prior
interaction with this local boy, versus the kind of interaction that I experienced when I first arrived at
Evergreen and was placed in the category “person of color” was just an interesting surprise. I didn’t
take offense. Some of the Japanese American faculty and staff at Seattle Central CC, whom I came to
know very well, were surprised at my not taking offense and said, “How come you’re not angry? You
always seem to be so cheerful.” I said, “Angry about what?” They had experienced such racism growing
up in Seattle— primarily the consequence of WWII—and how they were still being treated in Seattle,
they were angry people, and they were startled that I was not an angry person.
I was older than them. Didn’t I go through the war? I was born in 1943. By the time I had any
sense of anything beyond Lanai, I was grown up and had had wonderful interactions with Hawaii’s polyethnic people and never saw myself as less than, was never treated as less than, except, perhaps, by my
parents. They were the parents and we were the children. [laughing]
Zaragoza: Jan, I guess the heart of my question is, what at Evergreen or in Washington State were your
experiences with white supremacy, white chauvinism, male supremacy, male chauvinism and the settler
colonial mindset that has pervaded the history of this country?
Kido: I knew that at Evergreen, I was seen as Asian – not American, not Asian American – but Japanese.
There was an expectation that I would have a particular kind of worldview and behavior. I was asked
things like, “So, what do you do when ….?” Or, “How do you feel about?….” I knew what was being
sought. As an Asian woman, what did you think of ...? Whenever there was a visitor to the college from
our faculty exchange program in Kobe, Japan, I was called upon to greet and interact with them,
assuming that I spoke fluent Japanese – which I did not!
At first it was amusing that people would ask such questions. But this didn’t always happen.
When I had a chance to interact with the directors of the other graduate programs, we interacted as
administrators who shared similar concerns and there was no issue about my ethnicity or theirs. They
were both white —a woman and a man. We’d meet and discuss was going on in our programs and the
college’s expectations of each of us. I think those directors had valuable professional experiences in
diverse settings before coming to Evergreen - one was in Public Administration and the other in
Environmental Studies.
Then there were the interesting generalizations that people make when they assume that
you’re from a particular foreign culture. For example, there was a destructive tidal wave in Kobe, Japan
in 1995 and a number of faculty came up to me and asked me if I had any family in Kobe, and were my
family members okay? I thought, okay, they don’t know that I am American of Japanese ancestry, so I
23

need to let them know [laughing] that I didn’t have any relatives there. It was startling that, when they
saw me, part of their image was that I am a native of Japan, not a native of the U.S. The ones who, I
suppose, never had many experiences with people of color or with immigrants, just assumed the
character and background of a person they saw who was different from them. There were maybe three
or four faculty who asked me similar questions.
I was never discouraged by those interactions. I experienced humor and chuckled as I thought
about the naivite of the question. It’s probably because of my life experiences of being in the majority in
Hawaii. At the University of Hawaii, when we had to respond to federal questionnaires—like “What
percent of your student population are minority?” - we would laugh, we didn’t have minorities there!
Given our poly-ethnic population, how do you respond to that? Being a “minority” in the eyes of one’s
colleagues at TESC was a very different experience. I was not upset. I just thought, “They haven’t had
the range and depth of experience within diverse personal and academic communities.” They have to
have much more sustained life experiences with socio-cultural differences. The faculty did want to know
and I was just not the person to ask.
Zaragoza: We’ll wrap up in just a few minutes, but I wanted to see if there were any other highlights
from your time at Evergreen after MiT that you wanted to discuss.
Kido: I was startled, in the last Core program that I taught with Tosca Olsen and Andy Buchman, by the
students who were brand-new to Evergreen and who had just graduated from high school.
Because I had been teaching older graduate students and adult students in Tacoma, it was startling that
so many younger high school graduates had not transitioned emotionally and intellectually to their
independence and accompanying personal responsibility. They were challenged by being “managers” of
their own Evergreen experience. I was told by a few of the young men—and they were mostly boys—
that in high school, if they didn’t finish all of their assignments, they still received all of their credits.
Nobody ever took credits away from them for not completing their assignments.
It was a teachable moment for me to help them understand how Evergreen differed from their
high school experience; that we don’t award grades, we award credits accompanied by a narrative
evaluation of the demonstrated quality of the work submitted, as well as the steps the student needs to
take to improve aspects of their work. Hence, the awarding of credits reflects the work accomplished
and the evaluation reflects the quality of the work. This paradigm shift in their thinking was challenging
and was met with, “WHAT?!”

24

Zaragoza: Jan, as we wrap up, I want to be sure that we talked about everything that you really wanted
to touch on. Is there anything else that you’d like to discuss and have as part of your oral history?
Kido: I think the amazing creativity that the faculty are allowed at Evergreen to create and design
programs, such as the Master in Teaching program, is a gift to students and to faculty. As opposed to
most discipline based education program, The MIT was conceptually integrated across grade bands and
was interdisciplinary in its approach, the only one in Washington at that time. We viewed learners as
individuals with sociocultural perspectives of their own, that they needed to examine before they taught
“other people’s children, with their own sociocultural experiences. The goal for all teacher candidates in
TESC’s MIT program was to transform their thinking about teaching and learning - transformation in the
sense that Piaget talked about. They would experience a paradigm shift, a change in their perception of
the learner, of learning and of what it means to teach.
It was compelling for me that the MIT Program expected that out teacher candidates would be
centered on working with the “whole student”, and that they understood and would expect that
learning would be about transforming the thinking of their students. That was very inspirational for me.
The faculty who designed the program were highly risky, and I loved that riskiness.
Zaragoza: That’s wonderful. Jan, I want to thank you for spending time with us and getting your oral
history into the Evergreen Oral History Project. Thank you.
Kido: Absolutely. And to have this opportunity to talk like this has been amazing. One, I discovered
that I have forgotten many things and I needed prompts from old papers, and it’s good to know that
there will be an accurate record of Evergreen’s demonstration of what is possible in higher education.
One of the sad things that I observed as the years went by and more traditionally prepared
faculty came on board, fresh out of their PhDs, the creativity and interdisciplinary teaming diminished.
Faculty weren’t teaching in larger teams as much as we did when I came on board, or as much as the
first faculty did. Working as large interdisciplinary teams seemed to fritter away. I suspect that many
new faculty don’t see - and haven’t been shown - the enormous creativity and flexibility that faculty at
Evergreen explored in the many early interdivisional programs that integrated the arts, humanities,
natural sciences, social sciences in programs.
Zaragoza: I appreciate everything that you’ve shared with us. Thank you.
Kido: You’re welcome. Nice to have this very long conversation with you.
Zaragoza: You, too.

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