Brazilian, Italian, African-American Storyteller Creates Equitable Digital Access: Meet Dr. Angela Gunder, CAO of Online Learning Consortium
You may have met Anglea last year, or you can meet her this year at GlobalMindED June 7-9 in Denver. She will be facilitating and presenting on these topics:
What is your story, and how did you become an equity advocate?
I’d be remiss in not starting any story about my journey with a snapshot of the home I grew up in and the indelible impression left upon me by my parents. I grew up within an abundance of cultural riches, where dinners touched every corner of the globe, and bedtime stories were songs of rovers, gamblers, and thieves. My mother is a professor of world languages and a first-generation American born of a Brazilian mother and a Sicilian father. She’s a polyglot, an educator, and a fearless fighter for marginalized and underrepresented populations in education (and beyond). My father is an electrical engineer and an acclaimed Piedmont guitarist, singing stories made popular in the Virginia foothills in the 1920s and 30s. Both analytical and jocund, he is the son of a decorated Lieutenant Colonel of the Air Force, whose own father was a sharecropper in rural Virginia. Ironically, though these formative years were marked with an emphasis on oral traditions, music, art, and literature, I never fancied myself an excellent storyteller. Years later, as a respite from my involved work as a web designer in New York City, I created a food blog as a way to capture the recipes and food memories passed down to me from my Brazilian, Italian, and African American parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. I fell a rabbit hole in culinary digital storytelling. In finding my voice as an award-winning recipe author, I discovered the link between the sociocultural factors that drive how we grow to think, feel, and define ourselves as individuals.
In my circuitous path to my current role as the CAO of the Online Learning Consortium, I learned the importance of reflecting on and celebrating the diverse and disparate competencies that make up our unique individual and collective stories. My own has included themes of digital literacies, open culture, visual communications, narrative practices, and creativity. While on the surface, my work may seem like it’s focused on digital learning, it has always been about the power of sharing our narratives to build empathy, create connections, and advance a more equitable and just future. Storytelling gave me a voice that I didn’t know I had, and I strive for a world where individuals value the power and the transformative properties of telling their stories to organize and catalyze critical change.
What success secrets have allowed you to rise within academia and now, in your role leading the Online Learning Consortium as Chief Academic Officer?
One of my greatest success secrets has come from eschewing any notion that there is a normal pathway through this career and that we have to be open to letting the chapters of our story unfold through authenticity, transparency, and collaboration. I have had several colleagues sing a familiar refrain that beckons me each time I am on the precipice of a new challenge or adventure - to be proud of my questions and to seek out spaces and communities where being inquisitive and curious are celebrated. While academia often pushes us away from leading with our most authentic selves in favor of guarding our ideas, I’ve always lurked with the folks on the fringe and in the margins - the individuals passionate and hungry for co-creating answers to the ubiquitous questions that we continue to ask about how to make education more equitable, culturally-relevant, and impactful. For those that are trying to find their place or their path within this volatile, constantly-changing educational landscape, I’d recommend that you find the good people with shared values as yours, proudly share your questions with them within the safe spaces that you co-create, and actively listen for the answers from the world around you that will reveal what incredible work you can engage in as the next part of your journey.
What suggestions do you have for other women breaking barriers to lead within Higher Education?
Never forget the simple gift of making space and room for more women through recognition, gratitude, and inclusive acts. If you situate the relationships that you build as rooted in care and never transactional, you start to see places where your actions and words can help those around you to advance a culture of diversity, equity, and care. I’ve had countless women as mentors and advocates, but I have also had many men fight to clear space for me to contribute and shine. By committing to an ongoing process and practice of acknowledging the incredible contributions of our women (and BIPOC and LGBTQ+ and minoritized) colleagues, we signal that breaking these barriers is not a threshold concept where we can crossover and never have to fight again. Instead, transforming this landscape to center equity requires our collective commitment in micro and macro ways and across all we do. Our work here will never end, but rather than be dismayed by this fact, we are empowered by understanding the value of our commitment expressed through generative action.
What needs to happen within Higher Ed to achieve digital and other multiple equity measures nationally and globally?
I want to share another story to give some context for my answer to this question. An unabashed lifelong learner, I come from a family of academics, many of whom intentionally chose to work in community college systems. As an employee of Northern Virginia Community College, I supported and taught many learners with no opportunities for academic advancement other than the college’s offerings. Years later, this fact hit home in the formative months of my relationship with my husband. I learned that he was one of those same students I had previously worked with - brilliant and driven, but told by so many before that college “wasn’t for people like him” in that he didn’t fit the mold of a typical student. As I helped him navigate the waters of earning a college degree in his thirties, I discovered more of the barriers that not only “othered” my husband but also failed to recognize his amassed knowledge after decades of educating himself in his career that he built without a college degree. This wealth of experience was something that the classroom was meant to celebrate. However, higher education still uses harmful labels like “non-traditional learner” to make students like my husband feel like outsiders. For him, online learning provided him a safe space, not because he preferred to learn online, but because it offered him a more inclusive environment for revealing who he was, what he valued, and how it related to his success within the class.
In my work within the digital learning space, when we talk about digital learning equity, we have to start by putting down the baggage of thinking about our students as monolithic in their goals, needs, and intersectional identities. So often, when we talk about student success, we create harmful classifications that lump and cluster students together in ways that erase their unique lived experiences, values, challenges, and dreams. Instead, we need to think about the ways that we shift the educational landscape to signal to all students that our community is strengthened by their personalized contributions to the learning space, and in knowing what they bring to the classroom, we can make the pathways through the educational experience more equitable.
How can the GlobalMindED community of inclusive leaders support your work personally and professionally?
I spend much time reflecting on my leadership journey, not as a binary of leaders vs. non-leaders, but as an iterative process and practice that I actively contribute to over time. I see the most significant benefit to this practice as contributing to a culture of openness - a philosophy that encourages me to share both my successes and my challenges, to collaborate across all borders, and to commit to continuous improvement with the knowledge that I am made better by fearlessly tackling obstacles in front of me with the help of a cohort of advocates and allies. I recognize the community of thought leaders and equity champions of GlobalMindED as those that will continue to help me, just as I pledge to do the same for them. Storytelling will continue to be a key element in our continued collaborations; by narrating our practices, we will learn more about the local and global contexts for our efforts, as well as our own professional and personal journeys. Maya Angelou once said, “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” Conversely, Joan Didion shared, “We tell ourselves stories to live.” I encourage anyone reading this to lean into the GlobalMindED community as a precious space to tell your story, bringing to the forefront your narratives that will illuminate the collective path in front of each of us with new understandings of how we can ensure equitable access to education for all, and coming alive in the process.
