Published Wednesday, June 8, 2005
'Dean' Carter Studies The High-Achieving   
Former Engineering Consultant Graduates with a Doctorate in Education
By Lolita Paiewonsky
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

Friends call her "Dean Carter."  Her new colleagues at Michigan State University should get ready "to be immersed in the Dorinda Carter experience," said fellow doctoral student Richard Reddick.  And to many at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), it's little surprise that she is this year's graduate student speaker at Commencement.

While The Appian will focus on Carter's speech in a subsequent piece, here we profile the speaker herself -- the woman with an ever-patient, yet evocative and authoritative voice that brings the sweet and steady flow of molasses to mind.

Dorinda Joy Carter is the second of three children born to John and Dorethia Carter of Decatur, Georgia, with additional roots in Arkansas.  Dorinda is the first in her family to obtain a doctoral degree and the first to attend an Ivy League university. 

Miss Black Atlanta USA 2000 drove to Cambridge five years ago, switching back to education from her engineering consulting job with Manhattan Associates of Atlanta.  It was as though Dorinda could not resist the call of teaching.  She started out as a kindergarten teacher.  Her mother and several of her maternal aunts were educators.   She notes that, although her forebears were Arkansas farmers struggling to survive in the post-Emancipation 1800s, there was an innate sense of the need for education.   

Carter found a way to wed her left brain math and engineering proclivities with the love for teaching that was in her blood.  

By the time she arrived on Appian Way , Carter already had a taste of teaching in primary and in both urban and suburban high schools.   She realized that being out of the classroom was unsatisfying so she landed a job at the Media and Technology Charter High School (MATCH) in Boston .

Not only did Carter found a community service and mentoring program at MATCH where she worked for the first three years of her doctoral studies, then taught ninth-grade algebra the third year, but she also plunged into community service at HGSE.  She was active with the Student Government Association and the Black Students Union.  

Fourth-year doctoral candidate Richard Reddick recalled her dedication to the Alumni of Color Conference and the Students of Color Orientation. "Dorinda chaired the AOCC twice and, for as long as I’ve been here, [she] was the point person for the SOC Orientation,” he noted.  

This reporter also recalls the 2003 SOC Orientation and the lasting impression made by Carter’s dexterous command of the entire Askwith Lecture Hall filled with often eager, often hesitant new students of color.

Where did the nickname "Dean Carter" come from?  She “takes the time to encourage other advanced doctoral students," like Reddick, Kia Martin, and Phitsamay Sychitkokhong, and “even masters' students who are just starting their studies,” Reddick said.  She tries to motivate them to assume leadership and to speak up.  Reddick notes that Carter has been “a powerful voice to staff and faculty, and garnered the respect of both of these constituencies."

Helping those who can make themselves heard for those who need to be recognized and represented is an undercurrent in Ms. Carter’s work – from the community service and mentoring program at the MATCH school in Boston, to reaching out to junior doctoral and masters students at the Ed School, to refusing to remain silent about such far-reaching issues as minority faculty, to her mission to train teachers who will, among other things, give voice to their students, especially their students of color.  Third-year doctoral candidate Sychitkokhong observes, “I have seen her attention to fine detail, like fine print,” and “her keen understanding of the larger issues shines through…issues of voice and of representation.” 

After five years, the doctoral candidate does not leave Harvard satisfied with the pernicious sore that is the lack of diversity in the HGSE faculty.  She posits that while HGSE supposedly "does not keep its own [hire graduates of its doctoral program]," that claim is inaccurate.  She cites, “[E]xamples? Katherine Merseth,  Kitty Boles, Mary Casey, Vicki Jacobs, Richard Elmore, Michael Nakkula, and even Jim Stiles.”  Each obtained their Ed.D.s at HGSE, all are Caucasian.   Carter suggests that hiring doctoral graduates of color would not only ameliorate the problem, but “it would also solve some of the recruitment issues.” 

The Harvard experience has not been what Langston Hughes would call a “crystal stair,” and Carter does not see herself on a pedestal.  She poignantly shares – perhaps to the surprise of those who do not know her well – that she has been plagued by some of the same doubts of many others at HGSE, regardless of background or ethnicity – “Do I belong here? Am I really supposed to be here?”  

Like some other students, over the years, Carter has suffered personal setbacks, disappointments, and challenges.  She urged students to reach out, to each other, to a faculty member, to the various services offered by the University – health and psychological services and support, even classes such as yoga or meditation, and to houses of worship.  Carter shared that her own greatest resource for inner strength was, and remains, her Christian faith. 

While Carter is a staunch advocate for social justice and involvement, her life is not all work and no play.  Two years ago, she won second place in the University-wide Harvard Idol, a simulated talent show modeled after the television reality show “American Idol," at which the GSE almost had a full sweep of winners.  Though the judges were apparently captivated by the guitar prowess and songwriting skills of the competition, Divya Kimar of the Graduate School of Public Health, Carter shared how much fun it was to step outside and use a gift that she does not generally expose in public: singing.

On a serious note, Carter reflected that one source of her drive to make a contribution to the field of education comes in part from her own experiences in various schools while growing up.   She was educated in the South, in predominately white, suburban schools from elementary through high school.  She describes herself as having been a high-achiever and, as she matured, recognized the disparity she had observed while a student and then as a teacher.  Why were some Black and Latino students motivated to succeed and others were not?

The doctoral candidate’s dissertation is entitled In a Sea of White People: The Experiences and Behaviours of High-Achieving Black Students in a Predominantly White High School.  Carter related that she did not set out to ascertain any particular finding in connection with race per se.  She was uncertain of what she would find.  However, she was not surprised to conclude that the element of race was a factor in the students’ development on the road to success.  Her research indicated that two key elements were at work and psychologically impacted Black students' achievement in a predominantly- white, public, suburban high school:  critical race-consciousness, and the importance of maintaining a positive achievement self-concept.   She found that these elements were critical in the students' "self-definition" -- as, indeed, she reflected that these factors had in fact been impacting in her own construction of her self and in producing her state of high-achievement. 

The race-consciousness to which the researcher refers is dichotomous.  Ms. Carter explains that the students are Black, and that is part of who they are on social, familial, and other grounds.  However, it is not a limiting factor on their expectation or attainment of success or achievement.  The two concepts are not mutually-exclusive, nor should they be.  However, the consciousness of being Black, or of any minority/ethnicity, is viewed or accepted as important in learning or understanding how the system works, a system that incorporates systemic racism, racism that can adversely impact one’s educational trajectory and other goals.  These students, as did young Dorinda, resist such an adverse impact, refusing to allow it to be a barrier to achievement. 

Even though the soon-to-be Dr. Carter yearns for the classroom, she believes that she has found a calling now that can have an even greater impact on leveling the field for students of color in primary and secondary school:  Training teachers.  Not only to equip educators with the tools to teach well, but, perhaps more importantly, to sensitize them to nurture and motivate children of color, to be partners with their families and communities in shaping the attitudes and the experiences of these adults of tomorrow, and to set them up for success. 

She has been hired to engage in this work at Michigan State University.  It remains to be seen whether the Harvard Graduate School of Education will lure Dr. Dorinda J. Carter back to train its next generation of new, in-service, and returning teachers.

Lolita Paiewonsky is an Ed.M. candidate in Arts in Education Program and a member of the Appian Board of Editors.