Faculty Directory

Interview with Sonja Wiedenhaupt

Recent Teaching History
Reinhabitation, Fall-Winter-Spring 2000-2001
Health and Human Behavior, Fall-Winter-Spring, 1999-2000

Recent and Current Areas of Interest

The first time Sonja came to Evergreen she visited Rita Pougiales's seminar in the Millennium program and had tears in her eyes when she came out. The seminar was almost exactly as she had hoped to be. "Almost exactly" because in the seminar:

They had read each other's papers and gave each other such feedback "Rita barely spoke! I haven't even seen graduate students work this way with each other, never in the whole time I was at Berkeley! There never was this sort of attention to understanding and helping people clarify their thinking. Never! I just said, 'This is it.'"

It would be somewhat misleading to say that Sonja found the place she was seeking. For one thing, she only looked at one college. That hardly counts as a search. It is more accurate to say that Sonja is here because Evergreen found Sonja.

"I was at Berkeley six years. I actively taught; I participated in all the departmental events; [and] enjoyed the intellectual environment. The last two years I lived in a little hut in Point Reyes . . . and I commuted by bicycle to school once a week and came back out.

I would get up early, sometimes at four, for my seminar at nine, then I would spend two nights at Berkeley and I'd peddle back out--that was so beautiful, peaceful. And there I met a man (whose parents I knew well) who is an Evergreen Grad. When I first met him he had just finished cycling halfway across China. At one of our first conversations (he went) 'Oh you like teaching! Well I went to this great school called Evergreen and I loved Evergreen. . .'

I thought to myself 'When I grow up I'd like to teach at a school like Evergreen.' That was the first time I ever articulated that sense of what I would like to do. That really stuck with me. Every other transition had been . . . the one out of Columbia [for example] was, 'Maybe I should learn something more about motivation, that sounds good. It would be about learning--that's good.' This was . . . a very distinct call, 'When I grow up I want to teach at a place like Evergreen.' It was that time . . . to start looking for jobs. I was not ready yet. I knew I needed to start to write [the dissertation] first. I also needed to start thinking about what it would mean to start looking for a job. And there I looked in the APA Monitor, which is the psychology journal, and there was Evergreen. I went 'Oh look at that!' It was just a little message."

The following year the job announcement was still there because there was a failed search and that year is when Sonja visited Rita's class and applied for a job. She tried to apply for jobs at other places but could not bring herself to do it.

There's a way to view Sonja's career as a plan the gods took in hand. She was born in Germany, did primary and secondary school in England. Then, dubious about college, she took a year off. She decided to further her education in the United States at Wheaton College, which did not require of her an immediate decision as to major or career. "I thought I could do school without ever having to write. So I chose all my subjects at college with the understanding that I wouldn't have to write in them. I did languages. 'Psychology As a Natural Science' did not sound like a writing course. Of course I learned pretty quickly, within the first semester, that there is no such thing as a college class which has no writing, especially at a small school.) As things turned out her favorite courses were math and music. She took a class in psychology and art.

Eventually Sonja had to narrow her field of inquiry, but not by much. "I ended up majoring in psychology just because it was the way I thought, not because it was a passion of anything. Those were very interesting courses. Then I minored in music because those were the interesting classes. But I still didn't have a clear sense of what I wanted to do. Well that's not exactly true. When I was about sixteen I thought 'I want to be a teacher.'--because I had done a lot of work with inner-city kids teaching swimming and going orienteering and kayaking and (said to myself) this doesn't feel like work to me and I could do this. My Dad said 'Teaching! God! You can't make a living! You can't be an independent woman! Go into psychology! You can be a child psychologist and you can open a school on the side.'"

Sonja is certain that her Dad's alarm was not why she majored in psychology. And by extension one assumes that her dad was not responsible for her next move, which was to take time out from school and work for a while as a group leader in a school for mostly disturbed teen-age girls. "It was the hardest work I'd ever done. All the work with these young women, young girls from ten to eighteen, was really about building trust. The only training we got was in self-defense."

You can imagine how the rest of the story goes. Sonja had not decided that this was not what she was going to be, but if she was to continue to do this kind of work (she'd been bitten, had her hair pulled out) she needed more learning: "and I don't want to learn everything trial by fire."

She moved to Boston, went to night school, couldn't get a job as a research assistant, got a job at Harvard Medical School, as a photocopier (a practical skill she is proud of) was moved up to a position as Assistant to the Dean of Harvard Medical School (for reasons she claims not to know) and continued taking night classes on adolescent development and in writing, continued with her music and really began to ask herself "What am I going to do?" This was not made easy by the fact the Sonja really felt that no work was beneath her, she would do and learn what was at hand, but was unable to construct a career pathway.

"Then, my Dad in the background is saying, 'Apply for clinical psychology, go to graduate school!?'"

When the interviewer, who is not without daughters, remarked that her Dad was really pulling for her: "He was. He has a lot of faith in us. And thinks that we all don't have as much faith in ourselves. He's our cheerleader."

So she did her Masters in Developmental Psychology at Teacher's College, Columbia, in lecture classes of 175 students, no advisors. But New York, though it has many colleges, has other attractions. "I had a full time job as a concierge in the Marriot Marquee downtown in the theater district. I sang in fantastic choruses and even sang in an opera once. For three years I wandered the streets of New York City, going to class, going to work, just really thinking 'What do I want to do?'

Again fate casts Sonja in a teaching role. It began as a job helping a woman from Columbia with her dissertation. Sonja discovered that her difficulties had nothing to do with English, had everything to do with her inhibition with writing. In other words, the teaching role was psychological. Sonja enjoyed her role so much that she continued their daily meetings for a year, long after the funds to pay her ran out. This was just the most recent in a long history of "not teaching stuff but about creating an environment that felt safe in which to explore and try."

She began looking in the literature for others interested in learning and motivation and came upon Marty Covington, at Berkeley. After getting her masters degree at Columbia she applied at a number of schools but was accepted only by Berkeley and Marty Covington, the only person who was working precisely in the area in which she was most interested. When she found out about Evergreen she didn't even pretend to look at other places. Evergreen pretended to not be interested in her by not including her in the first round of interviews, but soon enough caught their mistake. Fate was not to be denied.

Interview by Pete Sinclair