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In The Ocean in the School Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence. Drawing on dozens of interviews with students he taught, advised, and mentored between 2004 and 2018 at the University of Washington, Bonus outlines how, despite the university's promotion of diversity and student success programs, these students often did not find their education to be meaningful, leading some to leave the university. As these students note, they weren't failing school; the school was failing them. Bonus shows how students employed the ocean as a metaphor as a way to foster community and to transform the university into a space that valued meaningfulness, respect, and critical thinking. In sharing these students' insights and experiences, Bonus opens up questions about measuring student success, the centrality of antiracism and social justice to structurally reshaping universities, and the purpose of higher education.
List of contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. What Does It Mean to Transform Schooling? 1
1. The Students, The School, The Ocean: Tracking Students' Lives on Campus 23
2. Pipe: Collective Mentorship as a Politics of Partnership 65
3. Those Who Left 107
4. Schooling Outside and Inside 149
Conclusion. Transformative Schooling Against Boundaries 191
Notes 203
Bibliography 277
Index 245
About the author
Rick Bonus is Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, coeditor of
The “Other” Students: Filipino Americans, Education, and Power, and author of
Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space.
Summary
Rick Bonus tells the stories of Pacific Islander students at the University of Washington as they and their allies struggled to transform a university they believed did not value their presence into a space based on meaningfulness, respect, and multiple notions of student success.
