Sarah Pedersen, 2021-05-18

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Staff Only

Sarah Pedersen 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: 2021-05-18

Biographical / Historical

Sarah Pedersen spent her childhood on and around Puget Sound and then chose to attend the OTHER alternative liberal arts state college in the region: Fairhaven College, receiving a BA in English Literature in 1973. Pedersen then attended the University of Kentucky, receiving an MSLS in 1976. This prepared her for a career in library science and her first professional job, at Northern Arizona University, where she also attended graduate school, receiving an MA in English in 1980. The entire remainder of her working life, 1980-2018, was at Evergreen. Pedersen held a variety of jobs transitioning from staff to administration to faculty, including stints as Head of Cataloging, Head of Technical Services, Dean of Library and Media Services, Library Faculty/Reference, Acting Academic Dean for Budgets, and Faculty. During her sabbatical of 1994-95 she read up on post-structuralism, but also took an extended sailing voyage in British Columbia and The Gulf of California, Mexico. She returned with enough sea-time to apply for a US Coast Guard captain’s license, which qualified her to skipper the school’s two wooden sail boats. Pedersen very enthusiastically shifted her curricular focus to coordinated programs in Maritime Studies which included maritime literature, maritime history, maritime cultural studies, sail training and seamanship. Over the following years she taught with faculty colleagues in the fields of Physics, Business, Leadership, Marine Ecology, Native American Arts, Music, and Evolutionary Biology. She also voyaged with students on many extended sailing trips on a variety of vessels. This kind of teaching was ONLY possible because of Evergreen’s emphasis on coordinated studies in full-time programs. Pedersen retired full-time to Anacortes WA in 2018, where the sailing and climate are perfect. Since then, she has been engaged in extensive political and other volunteer work: Steering Committee, Fidalgo Democrats; Democratic Precinct Committee Officer, Skagit County Democrats; Evergreen Islands & Transitions Fidalgo, environmental advocacy groups; Skagit Land Trust & Anacortes Community Forest Lands volunteer. Finally as a sort of land acknowledgment, here is a poem by Skagit Valley poet Robert Sund: “Ish River” --- like breath. like mist rising from a hillside. Duwamish, Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Samish Skokomish, Skykomish… all the ish rivers. I live in the Ish River country between two mountain ranges where many rivers run down to an inland sea.