Sally Cloninger, 2018-03-06

Item

Staff Only

Sally Cloninger Oral History Interview Transcript

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Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The Evergreen Oral History Project collection contains interviews with more than one hundred retired Evergreen faculty, administrators and staff. These conversations were conducted mostly by current and emeritus faculty. From the initial year devoted to designing the College (1970-71) to the present, Evergreen has been a highly innovative academic institution, committed to pedagogy that strongly supports students’ learning. The project’s purpose has been to document a very wide range of experiences and points of view of longtime members of this community. Faculty narrators recall how they developed their practices of team-teaching, interdisciplinary studies, communities of inquiry, and other distinctive features of the curriculum. Nearly all narrators tell stories about their biographical backgrounds, how being at Evergreen affected them, and how their work contributed to students’ education. Narrators also reflect on how they and Evergreen responded to challenges and changes of politics and culture, including issues of class, gender and race, over the College’s first half century.

The Evergreen Oral History Project began in 2016. As of May 2024, 104 retirees had been interviewed by twenty-eight interviewers. Interviewers have chosen whom they wish to interview, which imbues many of these discussions with the tenor of dialogues between friends. Rather than respond to a preset list of questions, narrators discussed whatever was most memorable and interesting to them.

Special thanks go to transcriber Penny Miller, who made draft transcripts of almost all of the recorded interviews; Amanda Walker and Abby Kelso, Vice-Presidents for Advancement, who sponsored and found funding for the project; Pat Barte and Ray Janssen-Timmen, for administrative support; John Sheehy, director of Reed College’s oral history project, for guidance launching ours; Susan Fiksdal, Anthony Zaragoza, Barbara Smith, Nancy Taylor and Nancy Koppelman, each of whom interviewed many retirees; Liza Harrell-Edge and Sadie Aymond, for accessioning and managing the collection in the Library Archives; and the anonymous donor whose generosity made the project possible. Sam Schrager has been director of the project.

Dates

Creation: 2018-03-06

Biographical / Historical

Sally Cloninger joined the faculty of The Evergreen State College in 1978, founding the media arts program and developing a unique curriculum that focused on praxis, feminist and “third world” film theory, visual anthropology, experimental media, documentary and of course, hands-on learning. With staff and faculty she created The Moving Image Group in the 1980s and helped grow the media arts faculty at Evergreen that was mostly staffed by women. Sally helped develop and sustain the Expressive Arts curriculum (Media Arts, Visual Arts, Theatre and Music) at Evergreen and served as its Convener for over fifteen years. She worked extensively in Asia and South East Asia during the 1980s and 1990s, collaborating with an international team of women who produced Into Focus: Changing Media Images of Women, An Asian Resource Kit and later training women television producers from Malaysia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, India, Iran, Indonesia, the Maldives, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. After retiring in 2011 Sally continues to make short and long nonfiction and experimental films. Her video and film work spans many genres including documentary (ch.a.lat: The Hoh River People and Dreaming of Spirit Animals: The Glass Art of Cappy Thompson), experimental autobiography (Going To My House, Living in the Mediuim), performance media (Mind Over Matter: Dr. Barbato Explains the 80s), media activism (Keeping A Balance and Nobody Cares for a Garments Girl), video installation (Shared Site), and experimental ethnography (Your Willing Power). While teaching at Evergreen, she collaborated with faculty, staff, alumni and students on many of her productions. Her films and videos have been funded by The Asia Foundation, the Swedish International Development Authority, USAID, the National Endowment for the Arts, the King County Arts Commission, Washington Commission for the Humanities and The Evergreen State College.