Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. xii, 249 pp. (Figure.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0672-5.
How do Pacific Island students construct places for themselves academically, socially, and culturally within the colonial legacies of higher education? In The Ocean in the School, Rick Bonus explores how student self-determination can lead to transformation of university learning, as well as highlighting the disjunctures between universities’ often tokenistic approaches to diversity and inclusion, and the actual lived experiences of minority students within those systems. The author places himself in the study as a Filipino-American teacher, advisor, and advocate for Pacific Island students at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, and draws from 11 years of experience in these roles to construct a detailed, personal ethnography and narrative analysis.
Bonus’s theoretical framework, referencing Epeli Hau’ofa’s seminal essay “A Sea of Islands,” imagines the school as an ocean, connecting Pacific Island students to each other, their families and communities, their ancestral heritage, and allyship with other minority students at the university. Within the “Ocean,” students both individually and collectively strategize to transform their experience of university education from one of marginalization and indifference to personal validation and cultural relevance, and to challenge the long-established monocultural systems and structures of the university itself.
The Ocean is exemplified with ethnographies of student-driven initiatives. Bonus describes the impetus behind and co-creation of an academic mentorship program, Pacific Island Partnerships in Education, established by Pacific Island student leaders out of concern for retention amongst their peers. Eventually the group’s activities expand to include an annual Polynesian cultural festival with a full day of music and dance performances, and many weeks of organizing and rehearsing. Bonus’s accounts highlight the onus placed on students, rather than the university, to perpetuate these programs, and how working together toward common goals within the Ocean includes long, often unpaid hours dedicated to mentoring and workshops for area high school students, meager operational budgets, and constant requirements for evaluation. Students fight for their own space both physically and culturally, eventually gaining separate recognition from the university as Pacific Islanders (apart from the United States government grouping of Asians and Pacific Islanders together demographically) and a dedicated study room for Pacific Island students in the university’s Ethnic Cultural Center. Another section focuses on student reactions to a study trip to the Philippines with the author, and an inaugural course in Pacific Island studies, which for many of the participants was their initial experience of culturally responsive Pacific curricula. In the concluding chapter, he states that self-determination and collaboration within the Ocean transformed many Pacific Island students’ experience of their university education from one they entered into as outsiders, into one with meaning and belonging.
Retention of Pacific Island students is low at the University of Washington, and Bonus approaches this issue by switching the focus of academic failure from the student to a critique of the university’s “unimodality” (111) of education. In his interviews with students who left school, Bonus unpacks how for some students, their university experience left unfulfilled their expectations of self-discovery, community, and culturally responsive resources for themselves and their families. As one student remarked, “whenever our culture is mentioned, it is labeled as an ‘extracurricular activity’—something outside of what school is” (147). Bonus describes how for some students, class attendance suffered when activism, organizing, or mentoring became more meaningful learning experiences than the university’s course requirements. The community built through these activities often endured even after students left school, as some students still returned to campus to present workshops to high school students or contribute to the annual cultural festival. These narratives raise a query: Are the skills, strategies, and leadership displayed by Pacific Island students in making the university experience more personalized and meaningful in and of themselves not valuable academic accomplishments?
Bonus’s discussions are nuanced, both celebrating and critiquing these efforts toward transformation and their successes and shortcomings. The richness of his ethnography is supplied by his leveraging of personal relationships and its longitudinal nature. Throughout, we are apprised of Bonus’s triumphs, arguments, and exasperations with the students he badly wishes to guide. He describes his study as an “ongoing conversation,” (20) and readers seeking a de facto toolkit for institutional change will not find it here. However, for university faculty, the book encourages a critical eye towards the depth and breadth of institutional responses to the needs of Pacific Island and other minority students. Are cultural and ethnic identities only represented in the form of “heroes and holidays,” (7) or are university initiatives—and the ways in which they are evaluated—transformative, culturally responsive, effective for student retention, and suited to address long-standing issues of structural racism? Additionally, for those who teach Pacific-related coursework, how are Pacific peoples, colonial pasts, and the geopolitical present represented and analyzed?
The Ocean in the School is a valuable resource for scholars working and researching in higher education and related fields. It champions Pacific Island students’ successes and initiatives in the face of rigid educational systems, and challenges universities and their faculty to do the hard work of true transformation to cultural responsiveness for them, and other minority students.
Michelle Ladwig Williams
Independent Scholar, Auckland, New Zealand