The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University by Rick Bonus

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University by Rick Bonus Rachel Endo (bio) The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University, by Rick Bonus. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 264 pp. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-1-4870-0742-5. The Ocean in the School: Pacific Islander Students Transforming Their University is a critical ethnography that centers the collegiate experiences of culturally diverse Pacific Islander students and their allies who attended the University of Washington between 2004 and 2018. Rick Bonus, who has spent over twenty years on the faculty in American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, provides firsthand insights into how an elite predominantly White university (PWI) that purported to value diversity, equity, and inclusion failed to fully live up to its promise in serving Pacific Islander students and other minoritized students. Using the cultural metaphor of the ocean to amplify the significance of "respecting nature, ancestry, and religious belief, and how paramount it was to the community care for the community above the self" (6), this work investigates how Pacific Islander students transformed their university by creating culturally affirming programs and spaces with little formal institutional recognition and support. The introduction interrogates several dominant definitions and explanations of "student success" in relation to the literature on academic achievement. Primarily drawing on Angela Valenzuela's framework of subtractive schooling, Bonus untangles the various individual and institutional challenges that Pacific Islander students navigated at a PWI that materially and symbolically failed to nurture their imagined-community values of care and collectivism. The first chapter provides an in-depth analysis of Pacific Islander students' collegiate experiences in relation to their university's structures and systems that stratified different groups of students based on classed, racialized, and other identities. While college is often imagined as a time for discovery, most incoming Pacific Islander students instead experienced despair and uncertainty, carrying forward memories from their K-12 years where they felt perpetually devalued [End Page 171] and uncared for. The second chapter provides an overview of the challenges and possibilities of collective mentorship through the Pacific Islander Partnerships in Education mentorship program (PIPE), where Bonus has also served as faculty advisor. In contrast to dominant mentoring programs that focus on one-to-one-relationships, PIPE is a culturally relevant partnership where participants "treated each other as if they were family members, something that many of them thought was the glaring omission in their school lives" (92; original italic). Like any close-knit community, various misunderstandings and tensions arose that at times created hard feelings, but overall, the program has persisted because it is a dynamic space where everyone genuinely cares for each other like family. The third chapter highlights the various reasons why many Pacific Islander students leave school. Bonus offers all PWIs with a bold reminder: several high-promise students do not necessarily drop out of school, but rather are pushed out for a range of reasons for which the institutions are directly and indirectly responsible. For Pacific Islander students, their university was a persistent reminder of their "colonized lives" (196) in all aspects of multiple types of curricula: formal, hidden, and informal. Ironically, many left school because they spent too much time participating in extracurricular activities for which most faculty and staff view as "wasteful, excessive, and unnecessary" (122). Indeed, universities pressure students to finish their coursework and degrees quickly without fully considering the value of a whole-person approach to retaining and supporting them. The fourth chapter articulates the possibilities of high-impact educational practices, which are loosely defined as "courses and programs that were central to students' lives rather than peripheral or extracurricular to their course of study in the university" (151). There are intangible payoffs when students are afforded opportunities to co-construct knowledge in ways directly connected to their lived experiences. Bonus focuses on several case examples including Poly Day, Pioneer!, a study-abroad class in Manilla, a course that one of his former students taught on Pacific Islander Studies, and other initiatives that blended academic content with community engagement and critical thinking. High-impact practices did not compete with traditional academic activities but rather...