Keywords

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  • Birthdate: June 23, 1955

  • Birthplace : Oakland, CA

  • Education

Grades K–8

Public schools in Saratoga, CA

Grades 9–12

Saratoga High School (in Santa Clara county, CA)

B.A.

Psychology, University of California, Davis, 1977

American Studies, University of California, Davis, 1977

Multiple Subjects California Teaching Credential, 1977

M.A.

School Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 1980

Pupil Personnel Services Credential for School Counseling, 1980

Pupil Personnel Services Credential for School Psychology, 1982

Ph.D.

Educational and School Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, 1985

  • Master’s Thesis

    • Longitudinal stability of social self-concept in 10–14-year-old boys and girls (1980).

  • Dissertation

    • The relationship of children’s self-concept and valuation with self-esteem academic effort and grades: A cross-sectional analysis (1985) (Honored with Outstanding Dissertation Award, School of Education, University of California Berkeley, 1986).

  • School Psychology Internship

    • San Ramon Valley Unified School District, CA (K–12 public schools in northern California)

  • Employment History

    • 1984–present: Department of Counseling and School Psychology, San Diego State University

    • At SDSU, my primary positions were:

      • Professor, Counseling and School Psychology (2001–present)

      • Director, School Psychology Program (2001–2002, 2008–2012)

      • Associate Professor, 1989–2001

      • Assistant Professor, 1984–1989

      • Doctoral Faculty, College of Education, SDSU (1998–present)

      • Director, School Counseling Graduate Program, 1988–1989, 1993–1996, 1999–2000

  • Selected Honors and Award

2010

Senior Scholar, invited to the national School Psychology Research Summit

1993–2002

Listed in the national directory, Leaders in School Psychology, published annually by the American Psychological Association. In 1997, one of nine psychologists in California and the only woman in Southern California to be listed.

  • Teaching Awards

2013

Most Influential Faculty of the Year, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, San Diego State University.

2006

Most Influential Faculty of the Year, School Psychology Program, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, San Diego State University.

1997

Meritorious Performance Award for Teaching and Program Leadership, awarded for meritorious performance (PSSI) during 1994–1997 academic years, SDSU.

1997

Outstanding Faculty of the Year, School Psychology Program, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, San Diego State University.

1994

Outstanding Faculty Award, Department of Counseling and School Psychology, College of Education, San Diego State University.

1987

Outstanding Faculty Award, Department of Counselor Education, College of Education, San Diego State University.

  • Scholarly Awards

1989

Affirmative Action Faculty Development Program Award for project titled “Research on Programs and Services for Underrepresented and At-Risk Students.” San Diego State University.

1989

Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA. (Awarded for meritorious professional accomplishments.)

1986

Outstanding Dissertation Award, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. Selected by faculty from among the 50+ doctoral graduates that year.

1985

Listed in Outstanding Young Women of America, Montgomery, AL.

1982

Outstanding Advanced Credential Candidate, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, to honor outstanding performance in professional preparation.

1981–1982

Department of Education Graduate Scholarship, UC Berkeley.

1980

McConnel-OPI Research Award for self-concept study, UC Berkeley.

1978–1980

National Institute of Mental Health Traineeship Award, UC Berkeley.

1977

Susan F. Regan Award for Outstanding Woman Senior, for leadership and scholarship, University of California, Davis.

1976–1977

Prytanean Honor Society member (Women scholars and leaders).

1973–1977

Regent Scholar fellowship, University of California, Davis.

  • Service Awards

2008

L. Ross Zatlin Mentor Award, San Diego Chapter of the California Association of School Psychologists, awarded for “years of inspiration and encouragement to school psychologists.”

1996

Administrator Award, California School Counselor Association, for service to school counseling and leadership of the SDSU School Counseling Program.

1996

Community Service Award, Black Caucus, California Association for Counseling and Development, awarded for and leadership student mentorship in the CACD-BC scholarship program.

Family and Growing Up

I was the eldest of three children born to Colene and Richard Ingraham, both native Californians. I mention that they are native Californians because it is rare for a person my age to have parents, and even some grandparents, who were raised in California. As a young married couple, my parents didn’t have a lot of money, and my mother remembers my father finishing tutoring appointments and then running to the store to get some groceries so she could cook dinner that night. Starting their marriage in the 1950s, the prevailing gender roles were clearly established, and the goal was for the man to provide for the family and the woman to be a homemaker, even though both of my parents had college-educated mothers. Family values of hard work, education, compassion toward others, resilience, and a love of the outdoors (family camping from an early age; my father was a self-reliant Eagle scout and consummate explorer) were instilled in us from an early age. As the eldest of three with a young-at-heart mother only 21 years older than myself, I became my mother’s confidante and helper; she and I continue our close bond to this day.

After a valiant 5-year battle with chemotherapy and radiation, at the age of 46, my father died of cancer during my third year of graduate school. I clearly remember my shock when I was about 24 and my father gave me the book Someone You Know is Dying: A Guide for Helping and Coping, asking for my help in guiding our family through the process, which felt like a daunting responsibility. While he was sick, I went with him to meetings trying to get financing for the business. His death was devastating to my family. I was named the executor of his estate, which was complicated by the legal and business matters in which he had been involved before his death. I was close to my father and remember fondly our talks about social and philosophical issues, such as when I was studying at UC Davis and taking a course where we were to design a utopian education system. We talked and debated about the nature versus nurture, the optimal role of institutions and government, politics, economic models, and other topics where my newly acquired education caused me to challenge the status quo, and he would play devil’s advocate just to see how I was thinking. My father, raised with stories of Horatio Alger and becoming a self-made man, worked a lot. Even when he had a full-time job, he taught math and electronics classes at a local community college in the evening. He accomplished his dream to build his own FM radio station from scratch, including the tower and all the electronics, the marketing and business model, and managing the staff. He invested all our family’s resources in the business and more than once, didn’t take his own pay so he could make payroll for his staff. FM radio technology was just developing at the time, and he was intrigued by the potential to use his electronics and business education. He put all of his efforts into building the business.

During this time, my mother was a dedicated homemaker and learned a variety of DIY crafts (she was very artistic) which she made into Christmas gifts; she kept the home running while my father worked. She enrolled us in public swimming and tennis lessons (she was a talented tennis player as a teen), scouting, softball, and team sports, and attended our school functions. Growing up with a working mother and artist at night, my mother dedicated herself to being the stay-at-home mother she didn’t have. My mother had an open mind and, though raised as a Protestant (and later on when she learned about the Unity religious teachings from my paternal grandmother), she encouraged me to learn about other religions, such as visiting the Catholic and Jewish services of my friends. I remember when she took a class at the community college on the Black Panthers (during the end of the 1960s), and she brought home provocative readings and discussions that she shared with me. Our engaging talks about racism, prejudice, bias, and ethnic studies were formative for me. She taught me about empathy, understanding and thinking about others, self-sacrifice for the welfare of others, love, inclusive thinking, art, and of course family. I learned about drive, determination, teaching, self-sufficiency, a love of nature, and innovation from my father, and both parents encouraged me to pursue my education and a career.

My employment history is unlike many in academe. I stayed at one university for my whole professorial career. In 1984, I came to San Diego State University (SDSU) as a Visiting Professor while I was completing the write-up of my dissertation. This was possible because Carol Robinson-Zañartu was on leave for a year and Jean Ramage was working as an Assistant Dean; thus the department hired two visiting faculty members (Valerie Cook Morales and myself) for the school psychology program. After 1–2 years, we both competed in national searches and were awarded tenure-track positions. In the beginning, I taught in the full-time Block master’s program, which included school psychology, school counseling, and MFT (marriage and family therapy) students. In my second year, I taught the “teaching students with special needs in the regular classroom” course in Teacher Education, worked as Assistant to the Dean as an Evaluator on the Teacher Induction Project, and continued teaching both school psychology and school counseling courses (the department was called Counselor Education at the time). Once in the tenure-track position, I continued teaching both school psychology and school counseling students, the research sequence, and supervising fieldwork and internships in schools and participating as a core faculty member to both programs.

There were many curricular and departmental transitions during my career. As things progressed, we shifted from an undifferentiated common core to the development of unique 60-unit course sequences for students in school psychology, school counseling, and marriage and family therapy. It was important to develop a professional identity early in the program for students, and for us to develop curricular experiences that would really prepare graduates for a specific discipline and profession. We conducted many program evaluations, such as those needed for program accreditation and graduate reviews, state credentialing for school psychologists and school counselors, and NCATE and NASP approval. In fact, we were one of the first NASP-approved school psychology programs in California (since 1989).

I worked with a number of deans and department chairs over time, some reorganizations in the College of Education, and the “burn the furniture” budget cuts and faculty furloughs (e.g., we took a 10% pay cut to keep our programs open) when the economy tanked. We did everything we could to maintain our programs and survive. As more of the faculty we hired identified as psychologists (counseling, school, community, and clinical), we changed the name of our department from Counselor Education to Counseling and School Psychology. This was an exciting time because it was the first very clear indication that school psychology was a vital part of a department that was primarily known for preparing counselors. Subsequently, we shifted from a 3- to a 4-year school psychology graduate program and developed the program to enable students to earn their masters on the way to their Ed.S. degree.

In 1998, I applied for and was invited to become part of the College of Education doctoral faculty and began to mentor doctoral candidates and also work toward developing a doctoral route for our school psychology students. I invested a great deal of time in trying to develop an SP doctoral program. This included serving on college-level doctoral committees, participating in many days of training on APA standards for doctoral programs, and developing drafts for the creation of a doctorate in school psychology. Due to budget restrictions and policies in California, the administration asked us to put the development of a doctoral program on hold, and we have yet to see it materialize. However, we have many school psychology program graduates who went on to complete a doctorate here or at other universities; thus, we have program alumni who are professors at other universities. I hope that the next generation of SDSU school psychology faculty will be successful in attaining and launching a doctoral program.

I will highlight some of my career experiences within themed sections in this chapter. One historical transition that has occurred within my work environment during my career is the cultivation of a research culture. As I was working to make the long transition from associate to full professor, I was involved in trying to create more supports for a research culture in our department. When I came, we taught 4 + 4 different graduate courses a year, had no assigned time for research, had two faculty to an office, and were expected to be in our offices daily for advising and mentoring of students. Research and writing were not a part of the daily or weekly fabric of our departmental culture. Most of the faculty members were already full professors when I was hired as an assistant professor, and the suggestions were to do my scholarship in the summer, during campus breaks, or on weekends. I developed a Research Committee in our department where we tried to support one another in the research and writing process. My fantasy was that the indication that we had been successful would be when we could walk down the halls and see faculty members doing scholarly writing in their offices and when faculty could take 1 day a week to work off campus on their scholarship, since that is where most of the real writing was happening at the time. Over time the university culture shifted to provide more mentoring for faculty members and more support for conducting research. For example, recently, I invited my school psychology program colleagues to contribute and coauthor a journal article I was developing (Ingraham, Paz, Lambros, & Green, 2019). We held some of our writing meetings on campus, on weekdays, and worked on some drafts in on campus, as well as at home, an indication that the norms had finally transformed.

During my career as a university professor, I have also worked as a consultant, trainer, project director, and evaluator on various projects. I led training institutes for the California State Department of Education and consulted about service delivery designs for school psychology, such as integrated and multitiered services, and consultation–intervention. I consulted with districts and schools looking to redesign their school psychological and mental health services, did program evaluation work, and conducted trainings in state, national, and international venues. I also directed projects, served as grant consultant, and supported a range of multicultural training projects, and consulted with universities seeking to enhance their school psychology programs. While I was offered faculty and administrative positions at other institutions, I decided to stay at SDSU throughout my career, with occasional consulting and side jobs along the way, thus keeping my energies focused on teaching, professional growth and service, and the SDSU School Psychology Program.

Involvement with Professional Organizations

During the first two decades of my career, I was very active in leadership within professional associations. I believed that by working together, professionals could really make a difference in the lives of children and youth and the practice of school psychology. I felt a responsibility to do my part in contributing to these organizations, providing leadership when needed, and serving on committees to work with others.

Nadine Lambert (at UC Berkeley) and Jonathan Sandoval (at UC Davis) were very active in the American Psychological Association (APA) throughout their careers, and I saw how invested they were in working on the various professional and organizational issues and making sure school psychology had a voice within the APA. Jean Ramage (at SDSU), a graduate of Nadine’s program, was very involved with the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) and had been an NASP president. These mentors and others were great role models for volunteering hours of time to helping the organizations represent our profession, run smoothly, and develop standards and guidelines for the profession. Getting involved in these types of leadership roles seemed natural for a university professor, and I began to develop networks and involvement in APA, NASP, and the national Trainers of School Psychology (TSP). I thought that paying your own way to these conferences was what dedicated professors were supposed to do, and at the time, the university only provided a small amount of funding toward one conference a year and only if you were presenting.

By my third year, after completing my Ph.D. and securing the tenure-track position at SDSU, I was beginning to get invitations to assume leadership positions within professional association committees at the state and national levels. Within NASP , I served on the Accreditation, Credentialing, and Training (ACT) committees, and chaired the Training Committee (1990–1991). Mike Curtis was leading the ACT, and he was a valuable role model for me. This helped me to learn more about how the professional training standards could guide graduate education and professional practice, and I became invested in helping graduate programs understand and meet the NASP standards. Mike was also on the interagency APA/NASP committee, and I began to learn more about the similarities and differences between NASP and APA, Division 16 (School Psychology).

I decided that, for me, both groups were important, and I elected to maintain active involvement with both, as well as the national (TSP) and state (SPEC) trainers’ groups. I became the Associate Editor (1989–1993) for the national Trainers’ Forum within TSP and cochaired the Constitutions and Bylaws Committee (1989–1990) within the state trainers’ group as we underwent transformation into a new organization. Incidentally, that was the same year I was approved for tenure and promoted to associate professor, after serving as interim director the prior year for the SDSU school counseling program when the director became ill.

For years, California’s school psychology program directors had met as an informal group at the annual state conferences and were convened by one individual, Joe Morris, who had kept the group going. Some of us thought the group needed to be developed into a more formal organization with a constitution and bylaws to guide the group’s purpose, organization, elections, and functioning of specific leadership roles charged with identified duties. As the founding president (1990–1991) of this newly organized group, the School Psychology Educators of California (SPEC) , I intentionally made plans for leadership succession and the transfer of organizational knowledge to incoming leaders working to engage a number of people in SPEC leadership. As an aside, there was discussion and tension at the time as to whether school psychology faculty were educators or trainers. At the national level, the term trainers was used, but within this group some faculty considered themselves “educators” (focusing on the research, science, and the theories that undergird practice) and disliked the term “trainers” who they perceived as just teaching skills and practices, not promoting critical thinking and scientist–practitioner models. For that reason, we decided to use the term “educators” in the name of this group (SPEC), despite the similarities of our purpose and functioning like the national TSP group.

At that time, I think there were only three NASP-approved school psychology programs in California, so I decided to bring the NASP standards for training knowledge to the California school psychology programs. I arranged for Mike Curtis and Dan Reschly to provide two training events in California (north and south) where faculty could gain in-depth understanding of the NASP standards and how programs could organize to meet them. The sessions were very successful, and more faculty decided to use the standards to reshape their programs and apply for NASP Program approval. At the time of this writing, there are now 16 NASP-approved programs in the state, 3 of which are at the NASP doctoral level. SPEC became very involved and influential in providing the state input on the new professional credentialing standards and maintaining good communication with the California Department of Education. We also prepared letters to the state and the national professional groups, expressing our collective concerns and recommendations, which were viewed as more influential than individual faculty preparing letters. In other words, we developed an organization that had representation and voice.

For me, the 1990s and early 2000s were filled with a high level of activity with both state and national organizations. I was fortunate to serve in a variety of capacities and to develop professional networks of faculty at other universities, which gave me a perspective beyond my own program, opportunities for making contributions and assuming leadership roles, and collaborating with like-minded colleagues. I was deeply committed to increasing the diversity and professional capacities of all school psychologists to serve culturally and linguistically diverse students and accepted roles that supported these values. Within Division 16, I chaired the Ethnic Minority Affairs Committee (EMAC) (1992–1996) and served on the Task Force on Cross-Cultural Competencies in School Psychology Practice (1994–1997; see our product in Rogers et al., 1999), led by Margaret Rogers (now at the University of Rhode Island). Through the EMAC, I sought to bring people together who were passionate about multicultural school psychology, and to give voice to multicultural issues and concerns within the profession. As one of our first projects, we developed the National directory of psychologists with expertise in working with culturally and linguistically diverse children and youth: Service delivery for culturally and linguistically diverse populations (Ingraham, 1995b), the first collection of professionals with such expertise in the nation. Our vision was for this to serve as a means for professionals looking for psychologists with expertise in specific cultural and/or linguistic groups to be able to contact a psychologist who could consult with them about how to develop culturally affirming services for a given client population.

Through EMAC and the Task Force, we set out to articulate some of the essential competencies for cross-cultural work in school psychology, as well as to educate the profession about the many ways that culture and language can impact service delivery. It was also an excellent opportunity for extended collaboration with like-minded psychologists across the nation over a 3-year period. We were able to support each other as we tried to educate a mostly White profession about important issues in multicultural service delivery at a time when there was skepticism among some about multiculturalism, both in the literature and in review processes, who thought it was not really “evidence-based.” We used a systemic and social justice perspective to advocate for institutional and societal changes that would reduce the systemic biases and institutional racism experienced by so many. I feel that one of our accomplishments was to help put multicultural school psychology “on the map” within Division 16 and to create greater awareness of how the prevailing professional paradigm, research, and practice, was neglecting the influence of culture and language in the field.

This led to our invitation to be “at the table” when the Task Force on Evidence-Based Interventions (EBIs) in School Psychology (1999–2007), sponsored by Division 16 and the national Society for the Study of School Psychology and endorsed by NASP, was established to develop criteria for evaluating the evidence for intervention within the field of school psychology. Tom Kratochwill (later joined by cochair Karen Stoiber) led this Task Force, with committees and specific groups working on different kinds of interventions. Evelyn Oka (at Michigan State University) and I were asked to cochair the Multicultural Issues committee, which was tasked with making sure the other Task Force committees were embedding and attending to multicultural issues within their respective domains. We worked for a long time (1999–2007), articulating how multicultural issues should be considered within the various coding manuals developed by the Task Force for identifying EBIs. We collaborated on this for 8 years, participating in Task Force meetings, working with Bonnie Nastasi who chaired the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Subcommittee (2000–2007), and we eventually published Multicultural issues in evidence-based intervention and contributed to the 2003 and 2007 Procedural and coding manuals for identification and review of EBIs (see http://www.indiana.edu/~ebi/EBI-Manual.pdf).

I also served on the national APA Division 16 Executive Committee, as the Vice President for Membership and mentor to the Student Affiliates of School Psychology (SASP), a national group of student leaders. I am proud of the students I mentored or worked with (e.g., David Shriberg, Samuel Song, Anisa Goforth, Margaret Sedor, Patrick Crain, and others) who have gone on to become leaders in professional associations and scholars.

So, With All of This Behind Me, When and How Did I First Find Out About School Psychology?

I don’t remember knowing about school psychologists as I progressed through my elementary and high school years. That awareness did not come until later in my undergraduate education, when I learned that I could combine my interests in education, psychology, and child development into one profession. I took a course in appraisal, and my professor said I had a real talent for problem-solving and integration of assessment data, and suggested I consider looking into school psychology.

Some of my major sources of influence throughout my career of course included my parents, who played a large role in helping develop my values and experiences as I was growing up, including my interest in other people, ability to problem-solve and think, confidence in myself, and love of family. Both of my grandmothers did well in school and went to college, which was not the norm at the time, and I was fortunate to have them in my life as I grew up. I was also influenced by my early teachers in school, such as the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Wall, who went on to earn a doctorate. She told my mother that I was very quick to learn things. Then there was my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Peterson, who invited two peers and myself to her home for a dinner where we did a spelling competition. In high school, my Spanish teacher, Mr. Bougerie, encouraged a group of us to read novellas and plays in Spanish and discuss the poignant themes they portrayed. I had coaches, teachers, friends, and family members who all played significant roles in my early experiences.

In the university, there were several people who impacted my career development. During this phase of my life, my relationships with boyfriends, peers, and some professors were significant. At UC Davis, I was intrigued by a psychology class with Stan Coopersmith, the radical teachings of some of my American Studies and alternative education professors, women professors such as Marlene Wilson, and my friends in the teaching/education track of American Studies program such as Nancy (Schumacher) Rosenthal, who was innovative and brave in trying new teaching approaches in her student teaching. I spent 3 years within the education track in American Studies, where we spent many class sessions discussing social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ways that cultures and belief systems shape institutions and individuals. This supported my questioning of why things like the schools were the way they were and what might be done to improve them. Personal relationships were also influential, for example, around the age of 20, I was in love with my boyfriend for 3 years and almost went with him to the University of Utah during my undergraduate years (which might have changed my career journey). Then he decided to stay in California.

In my doctoral education at UC Berkeley, there were many people who influenced my thinking and career. I learned professional and school psychology from Nadine Lambert (who served on my master’s and dissertation committees) and Carole Swain; psychiatry and mental health consultation from Wilson Yandell and Vjard Kasanjian (hope I spelled that correctly, it has been a long time); cognitive development from Paul Ammon, statistics and measurement from Leonard Marascuillo; social emotional development and programs from Eli Bower; higher education and research from Paul Heist; self-concept and motivation from Martin Covington (who chaired my dissertation); moral development from Elliot Turiel and fellow students Abi Harris, Jeff Braden, Deborah Tharinger, Brent Duncan, Katheryn Yager, Dana Sassone, Melanie Shane, Jackie Cheong, and many others. During this time, my friends taught me about different religions, values, paradigms, cultures, belief systems, and living with widely diverse individuals. Through my close friends, I learned more about alternative cultures, meditation and alternative health practices, LGBT issues (this was as AIDS was really impacting the San Francisco Bay Area), the historical Palestinian and Jewish conflicts, different fields of study and professional practice, urban issues, progressive politics, law, and more. I sought and experienced cultural plunges and countless new learning opportunities, participated in my first counseling session as my father was dying, and learned many new paradigms and ways of thinking and being.

Within the field of school psychology, I have been influenced by many individuals. At SDSU, Jean Ramage recruited me as a faculty member and was active in NASP; both Valerie and Carol were program faculty with whom I spent extensive time and collaboration, and Judith Katz (now in corporate strategic diversity consulting), and I shared an office and became longtime friends. As describe later in this chapter, I had many professional colleagues and friends at other universities who were influential in helping me learn about the life of a university professor, how to keep life in perspective and the importance of engaging in innovative conversations and collaborations over the years: Margaret Rogers, Emily Lopez, Mary (Henning Stout) Clare, Abi Harris, Shari Tarver Behring, Joel Meyers, Jonathan Sandoval, Sylvia Rosenfield, Daniel Newman. Within the professional organizations, I learned from Mike Curtis, Dan Reschly, Bill Erchul, Deborah Tharinger, Jack Cummings, Bonnie Nastasi, and others.

My formal education and training in School Psychology was through the APA approved doctoral program in School Psychology at UC Berkeley, directed by Nadine Lambert. During 1977–1982, I completed all of my classes, field experiences (practica and internship) in different districts, and Research Assistant positions with Dr. Lambert’s projects. I had the honor of taking graduate courses from some wonderful scholars, researchers, theorists, teachers, and professional supervisors. I took far more than the minimum required coursework so that I could gain a deeper understanding of related fields such as educational, community, social, cultural, and organizational psychology, in addition to child development, education, and related disciplines.

Second, I was trained as one of a team of research assistants to collect student data and conduct testing and developmental assessments of K–12 students participating in Dr. Lambert’s longitudinal study of students with ADHD from different school districts. I also had the privilege to work closely with Nadine on the Special Education Information Systems Project with five school districts, to try to develop a system for IEP development that would yield codable data for research. In this position, I had the opportunity to work side-by-side with Nadine as we collaborated with the district administrators to design the information system. My role was to interface between this group and the computer coder who was setting up our database system so that the system we developed could fully represent relevant information in student IEPs that would be accessible for us to research once the database was developed. We had the vision of a mobile van that could be used by IEP teams to record the elements of the IEP (this was around 1980, long before we had laptops and internet).

Another aspect of my training came from working on committees within our professional organizations (e.g., APA, NASP, TSP, SPEC-CA trainers) with colleagues across the nation and in other countries, and from the many national and international conferences I attended. This helped me view the profession through a global lens and a variety of perspectives, and it exposed me to issues that were prevalent in other places.

A fourth aspect of my school psychology development was through trainings for accreditation and program approval through APA, NASP, NCATE, CDSPP, TSP, and other groups. Here the focus was more on the overall design of training programs, learning ways to develop assessment mechanisms, how to address the national and state professional standards and providing input in the development of the state and national standards for training and practice. This provided a wide-angle view of the profession that was valuable in seeing how all the training components come together to establish professional knowledge and competence.

Finally, an additional way that I learned about school psychology was through my preparation for developing and teaching different school psychology courses. Over my time as a SDSU professor, I taught close to 30 different graduate courses, as well as proposing and developing several new courses. These ranged from topics in consultation, research, interventions, counseling, assessment, ecosystems assessment/intervention, professional seminars, supervision of fieldwork/practicum/internship, professional seminars, leadership, introductory and advanced seminars, program development and evaluation, career counseling and assessment, and teacher education. For some classes, I sought additional training, such as workshops at APA and NASP and international, national, state, and regional trainings. For example, when I was assigned to teach the ecobehavioral assessment and intervention course (my formal education was more in development, prevention, and consultation rather than ABA), I attended several days of advanced training institutes to get certified in the behavior support plan (BSP) and behavior intervention program (BIP) which are now part of the State Department of Education’s Positive Environments, Network of Trainers (PENT). Similarly, I attended nationally recognized PREPaRE and Restorative Practices trainings to support my teaching of the Crisis Intervention, Prevention, and Conflict Resolution Class.

My Career Path

The Journey to Become a University Professor

I did not set out to earn a doctorate and become a university professor. Rather, my career process was to set incremental goals and, once I achieved the next level, I looked around and learned about other possibilities and recalibrated my goals. For example, as an undergraduate, I was preparing to become a teacher, and then became interested in school psychology as a possible way to combine my interests in child development, psychology, education, and systems level issues. I applied to California Ed.S. and doctoral-level school psychology programs, including the doctoral program at UC Berkeley. Once in a doctoral program, I aspired to be a school psychologist and perhaps a director of student support services in a district. During the early 1980s as I worked on my dissertation, my professors suggested that I had a good mind for conceptualizing theoretical and research issues, so I then thought about using my doctorate for that.

With my father dying in 1980, I had many responsibilities for managing his estate while I continued taking my coursework. As I was analyzing my dissertation data and thinking about where I might work, faculty suggested I consider becoming a university professor. I enjoyed presenting at professional conferences and had good success with getting five proposals accepted in 1983, so I decided to apply for faculty positions, not really understanding the difference between tenure-track and visiting positions, nor the workloads and resources available at Carnegie research versus state universities. Nadine Lambert tried to get me to apply to major universities in other states that had doctoral APA-approved school psychology programs, but I wanted to stay in California nearer my family. I applied for one California university position where I would have been teaching five large psychology undergraduate courses per semester. I did not understand how taking such a position would affect my ability to develop a sound research program and position myself for tenure and promotion. I did not know the steps involved with becoming an academic, and I was still working to finish my dissertation analyses and write up.

I accepted a visiting assistant professor position at SDSU where I would be teaching 4 + 4 courses because I was impressed with the opportunities for growth and the faculty. I turned down an offer for a tenure-track position at another state university, again, not really understanding the risks of coming in without a tenure track line. Needless to say, taking a full-time visiting university position with a heavy teaching load and four new course preparations a semester while trying to finish my dissertation was extremely challenging. There was no new faculty start up package or other things I later learned people negotiated to attain before accepting their offer. Near the end of my first year, my boyfriend (who lived back in Berkeley) and I broke up, which only added to the pressures coming at me from all sides. Thankfully, after 2 years, I was hired into a tenure-track position at SDSU and began my career as a university professor in a teacher–scholar university with expectations for faculty to develop a robust publication record. I learned a great deal during those early years as a faculty member, and it was both stressful and exhilarating.

Developing the SDSU School Psychology Program

Jean Ramage developed the school psychology program at SDSU , and by 1984, she had recruited a dynamic team of core faculty: Carol Robinson-Zañartu (who came in 1980), Valerie Cook-Morales (who came as a visiting faculty member as I did in 1984) and me. The four of us were very hard working, had real passion for school psychology, and each of us provided leadership in different ways. (See the chapters in this book by Carol and Jean for more information on their careers.)

In the 1980s at SDSU, two faculty members were assigned each office, and Valerie and I shared an office during our first year. The four of us were very involved with the national and state school psychology organization, presenting at conferences together, and we devoted countless all-day program retreats to develop the vision, curriculum, and practices for our school psychology program. All four of us attended NASP, CASP, and the national and state Trainers’ meetings, holding offices in several of these groups. After a few years, Jean went on to become a dean in another state, and Valerie, Carol, and I continued working together at SDSU for the next 25 years.

We developed the program to focus on multicultural school psychology, ecosystems and systems interventions, and educational equity. We worked diligently to create the program climate and curriculum that supported students from a diverse group of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and we were very successful in recruiting and graduating outstanding school psychology students, increasing to about 85% students of color over the years. Given that the profession of school psychology was and is still predominantly white, we stood out in that we were graduating students with the knowledge and skills to be excellent school psychologists who also had the cultural, linguistic, and multicultural knowledge and skill to serve in the diverse public schools. Our program became known as a place that prepared outstanding bilingual/bicultural and culturally competent school psychologists.

During this period, we engaged in massive curricular and program revisions. I had the opportunity to propose, develop, and teach a whole host of new courses in the department, such as consultation, intervention with children, child and adolescent development, program development and evaluation, professional seminars in school psychology and school counseling, and an advanced seminar in school psychology that was focused on school-based research. During my time as director of the school counseling program, I developed the 60-unit master program in school counseling. Concurrently, Valerie, Carol, and I developed the new school psychology master’s program. Together, the three of us reorganized and transformed our assessment sequence, first to embrace what was called alternative assessment, and then assessment-for-intervention. We worked to develop a wide range of fieldwork and internship opportunities for our students, organized supervisor institutes to provide professional development for the supervisors, and we established many practices where our students were working alongside us in schools, at conferences, and within a shared governance paradigm. Eventually, we were able to grow the school psychology program into an integrated Ed.S. program and embed much of our culturally focused grant work into the curriculum.

Our success with applying for and securing grants supported this process. Our grants started with bilingual school psychology in 1986, expanding during 1989–1994 to multicultural school support personnel (for school psychology and school counseling that Valerie and I codirected) Valerie’s African American school psychology project (1995–1998), and Carol’s Native American scholars projects over the past three decades. These projects were significant in providing financial support for our students as well as bringing culturally specific training and expertise to our program. All of us learned from our work with these grants, the specialty seminars for students, and the advanced trainings they provided to the faculty and community. For example, we went on extended days of training and professional growth and immersion, such as to Mexico to strengthen our bilingual/bicultural school psychology areas, and to a ceremonial training with a wonderful traditional Diné healer to learn more about Native American and Indigenous ways, and to each other’s homes to collaborate in continual program planning and functioning. We thought deeply about the profession, where we thought it needed to go, and what we could do in our program to prepare our students for their future leadership roles. We engaged in passionate debates and discussions, sometimes fought over how to accomplish our goals, and, admittedly, were consummate workaholics. Through it all, we also accomplished a tremendous amount, and graduated generations of talented, competent school psychologists, some of who have gone on to become accomplished university professor (e.g., Sam Ortiz, Brandon Gamble, Julie Esparza, Alan Daly, Emilio Ayala, Veronica Escoffery-Runnels), NASP and CASP leaders, directors and coordinators in their districts, SELPAs or regions, and practicing school psychologists in several states. We are now at the point where we have a cadre of program alumni as adjunct faculty members and supervisors of current trainees, with some children and nieces of our former students.

Valerie served as our school psychology program director for over 20 years, and she and Carol had a long list of funded grants. In 2008, when Valerie decided the program director role was too much for her, I became the program director. I had previously directed the school psychology program for a year (2001–2002) when Valerie was getting treatment for cancer. Carol was our department chair for a number of years and following her retirement in 2010, Valerie served as our department chair for 2 years until she died suddenly in early 2012. Her passing was a huge shock to our program and the many alumni who knew her. As program director at the time, I did my best to create grief circles and program activities to help us cope with her loss, but it took us a long time to recover, and it really made us contemplate our workaholic norms and need for greater self-care in our department.

Attaining National Certification and Directing Both School Psychology (NCSP) and Counseling (NCC)

I was educated in school psychology at Berkeley, with an emphasis on development , consultation, and prevention. When I accepted the faculty position at San Diego State University, they sought a faculty member who could contribute to both school psychology and school counseling. I saw ways that my school psychology training could contribute to the school counseling program and profession, and I began teaching courses in both programs. In my fourth year as a faculty member, Alice Cochran, the wonderful woman directing the school counseling program, became ill and died, and I assumed the director’s role. This was before I had gone up for tenure, and I was working actively in both school psychology and school counseling programs. There were no other tenure-track faculty identified as school counseling, and the program needed leadership. I served a total of 5 years as director of the school counseling master’s and credential program, while continuing my role as a core faculty member in the school psychology program, until we finally hired a new school counseling director. During this time, I did my best to be current in school counseling, presenting at national and state conferences with students, attending school counseling trainers’ meetings, and learning and maintaining qualifications as a Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC, 1999–2009). At the same time, I continued leadership roles within school psychology associations and maintained qualifications as a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP, 1989–current).

In all, I served as a graduate program director for 10 years (5 years in SP and 5 years in SC). The positive side of all this is that I was able to develop and use my skills as a program director, but the downside is that maintaining currency in two disciplines with their respective set of professional associations was time-consuming and impacted my publication rate during those years. After 25 years in my career, in 2009, when I was directing the school psychology program and we had a full-time director for school counseling, I decided to let my NCC go and just focus on the NCSP and school psychology. This ended up being a good choice for my health and family. It also helped assure more stability, especially during the budget cuts following the 2008–2012 financial crisis, my family’s 18-month dislocation due to a house fire, and then my intensive community-based work with the restorative practices and trauma-informed community school project between 2010 and 2014.

Next, after researching, writing, and training in the area of multicultural consultation for a number of years, I embarked on a new area of research methodology, and started two new research teams. In graduate school, my training had been mostly in quantitative methods, and, as I learned more about how qualitative methods could more appropriately address some of the complex and nuanced issues of interest in multicultural consultation, I sought out learning about various qualitative methods and approaches to research. When I was about to turn 60, I started a new branch of my research program that used narrative text and NVivo to code written documents. This was the beginning of my work in using grounded theory to develop new theoretical understandings that grew out of the participant data, rather than a priori hypotheses.

Some might question why, at this stage of my career, I would invest all the time and energy to learn a new methodology and construct multiple new databases. I had to grapple with this question myself, and I decided that learning new approaches would be exciting and help address some fascinating research questions that intrigued me about how people learned to do multicultural consultation and how teaching supports assisted them. I wrote a grant that got funded, purchased, and learned the NVivo program, read books about constructivist grounded theory, using qualitative methods to code and analyze narrative text, and collaborated with Daniel Newman (first at National Louis University and then to the University of Cincinnati) on a multiyear cross-university dialog project. We just got this accepted for publication. Danny was great about helping me learn to use these approaches with integrity, trustworthiness, and a rigorous qualitative design. I started two new research teams at SDSU with school psychology graduate students interested in a new area of research. As I learned, I taught my teams, and we engaged in a multiyear collaboration that has resulted in two projects involving a total of seven students. We have presented at conferences and are now finalizing the first manuscript for publication (hopefully) for a special issue on qualitative methods. One interesting feature about this kind of research is that it is extremely time-consuming and thus might be challenging for someone who is not yet tenured to take on, or for those who can’t wait for 3 years to finish coding and analyzing the data. We used a rigorous method to co-construct the lexicon of over 175 codes and then to code collaboratively, as we went line by line with two (and sometimes three) people coding the text material. We used a co-coding method to better represent the data from multiple perspectives, rather than to rely on the interpretations of a single coder. As you might imagine, it took us a very long time of intensive teamwork to complete the co-coding process before we were ready to do analyses and writing.

Career Highlights and Peak Moments

I have been honored with many highlights and peak moments throughout my career. I think these helped to fuel my continued work in the field, as well as develop persistence in the face of challenges. They also served to build my confidence in continuing in the profession.

As a graduate student I was recognized with the Award for Outstanding Professional Practice at the end of my school psychology internship year, and then with the Outstanding Dissertation Award when I graduated 2 years later. In each of these awards, I felt very honored, because I knew of the outstanding work my talented peers had been doing and was truly moved to receive these awards at Berkeley. My doctoral mentors, Nadine Lambert and Martin Covington, provided encouragement as I sought to propose a new theory for how individuals compose their values and self-concept dimensions into their self-esteem. I took 5 years, from first proposing the concepts in my third year of graduate school to completing my dissertation in 1985. I had to develop and pilot measures for the constructs and the research design to sufficiently test my theory. My faculty were supportive and didn’t push me to pick a more straightforward or “easier” dissertation topic, and I was honored when upon completion, the Berkeley faculty selected my dissertation out of about 50.

When I graduated from Berkeley, only some doctoral graduates were going into academics. Thus, when I got my position as an assistant professor, I was very proud, perhaps especially since I had not set out to become a professor and now found myself in this new role. I followed the professional trajectories of Deborah Tharinger and Jeff Braden, who had finished the Berkeley school psychology program close to when I graduated and who went into tenure-track university positions. There were also graduates long before me, such as Jonathan Sandoval, who progressed through university academic and administrative roles, but he was very successful and well established in his career at the time I graduated, so I saw him as a mentor rather than a peer. Without really knowing people who had chosen this career path, I was lacking a role model and did a lot of learning-the-hard-way about how to be a university professor. Looking back, I feel gratified that I made it through the journey and had a successful career. Thus, becoming a university professor was a highlight, as well as several experiences that came after that.

Consultee-Centered International Invitational Seminars

A major highlight and turning point in my career occurred in June of 1995, when the very first International Invitational Seminar on Consultee-centered Consultation (CCC) was being held in Stockholm, Sweden. As later described in a publication, “consultee-centered consultants facilitate rather than force solutions or change, and do not impose their own problem definition on the consultee” (Newman, Ingraham, & Shriberg, 2014, p. 15). I wanted to support this new approach and to interact with others who were committed to consultation that was focused on the consultee, not just the student or behavioral goals. Two of my professional mentors, Nadine Lambert and Jonathan Sandoval, were organizing the first international seminar, and Gerald Caplan, known as the “father” of mental health consultation (from which CCC emerged) was going to be there. They invited me to participate, and I very much wanted to go. Then I thought, I have an infant son now, and I need to make decisions that are best for my family, not just for my career or intellectual interests. With my childcare expenses as high as they were, how could I possibly afford to go to another country? I would have to decline this amazing opportunity.

Then a SDSU school psychology colleague, Michaelanthony Brown-Cheatham, suggested that I should go if it would be so stimulating to my career and work and that I could take my son with me. What a concept, I thought! Could I really do that? I began writing proposals for some help with the funding and also explored how I might manage with my son. A colleague from Berkeley was planning to attend and to bring her 18-year-old daughter; she suggested that I pay her daughter to take care of my son while I attended the conference. It looked like everything was falling into place. I got our passports (I still have the passport photo of my son at 7 months old) and began exploring the availability of baby food, and other necessities in another country halfway around the world.

Unexpectedly, 2 weeks before we were to depart, my friend and her daughter cancelled their plans, and I panicked. What was I going to do with my baby, who I was still nursing, in a country where I knew no one? I am blessed that Ingrid Hylander and the other Swedish conference organizers offered college-aged family members who I could hire for child care. They helped me arrange for a crib in my hotel room, and I got information about the brands of baby food and diapers I could find in the Swedish markets. I proceeded to prepare for the 23-h plane ride with my then 9-month-old son.

The trip was amazing! The Swedish culture is more family-friendly than the United States, and strangers would help me get my stroller off the bus and warmly greet my son and me. For me, there was a good deal of cross-cultural learning, and I did my best to learn some Swedish words and how to manage their currency. I frequented the market to get baby supplies as needed. I was running up to my room about every 3 h to breastfeed, and was able to interact with international psychologists from many countries and regions who were interested in consultation. I felt brave enough to take my son for stroller walks in the park and to places where he could get out and explore our new environment and take memorable pictures.

At the seminar there were presentations and discussions with psychologists working in preschools, community agencies, and schools across a wide range of cultures and continents. It was fascinating to learn about how they conceptualized and practiced consultation, what they thought were the needs in the field, and what they wished this convening to be able to accomplish. I remember observing a variety of interpersonal and cultural communication styles as the group meetings sought to find commonalities and differences in how we approached this consultation work. For example, I recall a U.S. school psychology faculty member who would speak out when he had an idea, question, or thought. In contrast, some of the Scandinavian participants were less direct, and they would raise a finger to indicate that they wanted to say something, sometimes not getting noticed by the more outspoken participants. Those of us who were aware of these dynamics worked to assure that we were inclusive and heard from all who wanted to offer their thinking regardless of the communication and interpersonal style in which they tended to participate. The paper I presented, “Cross-cultural applications of consultee-centered case consultation” which focused on some of the ways that we can use CCC to work across cultures was later published in Ingraham (2004) as part of the book developed (Lambert, Hylander & Sandoval, 2004) through these International CCC conferences. This was a turning point for me because I felt like I found a group that understood what I was talking about and who were interested and encouraging.

The seminar was a huge success and felt extremely gratifying. We agreed that we wanted to continue these international seminars, with the next one tentatively planned for a few years from then. I treasure the opportunity to have participated in this historical event and felt invigorated and energized to find a group of people who thought about consultation the way I did. For us, consultation was an important relationship-building and problem-solving process that left the consultee feeling supported, empowered, and with a new conceptualization of the issues they brought to the relationship. It was quite different from the expert models of consultation prevalent in some circles, or the behavioral focus of some of the U.S. consultation approaches prevalent at the time. This conference launched a three-decade journey and the emergence of a new international definition for consultee-centered consultation. (See Newman & Ingraham, 2017 for a timeline of CCC history.) For me it was a personal triumph as well, because I learned that I could integrate my roles as a parent and scholar and that one role did not need to eclipse the other. I could be a dedicated parent and still keep my intellectual side alive and growing with innovation and creativity. I could develop this new identity as a working single parent who was, simultaneously, a scholar, teacher, and university professor.

Tragically, in April of 2006, Nadine Lambert (1926–2006) was killed in an accident when a runaway truck hit her car on her way to work. This was just before the fourth International Seminar on CCC in Chapel Hill, NC, which was focused on CCC service delivery for evidence-based interventions and CCC training. We were stunned by Nadine’s death and decided to hold the seminar, as scheduled, to honor her. At that time, we also decided to create a formalized network of people who supported CCC. I led the development of the CCC Interest Group (IG) within NASP (founded in 2006) and Ingrid Hylander, one of the original CCC conveners, and Sharone Maital created the CCC Interest group within the ISPA (founded in 2008). We thought this was a lasting way to memorialize Nadine’s work and to bring the work into the future. A fifth International Seminar on CCC was held 2 years later in Boston, where our main focus was on the need for developing training materials and case studies for CCC that could be used to help people learn the approaches. Subsequently, books were developed by Jon Sandoval (2012), Sylvia Rosenfield (2016), Antoinette Miranda (2016), and Daniel Newman (Newman & Rosenfield, 2019) and several of us developed and distributed training materials for other consultation educators. These CCC groups have continued meeting at annual conferences, providing a place for researchers, trainers, and practitioners to discuss aspects of the approach. In 2011, Daniel Newman joined me as the cochair of the NASP CCC group, and we have continued the meetings each year. This year, in 2020, will be our 15th year of holding the annual CCC Interest Group at the NASP convention.

In 2017, Daniel Newman and I co-guest edited a new special edition of the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation (Newman & Ingraham, 2017) on consultee centered consultation. This served to update the field since the 2003 special issue, co-guest edited by Jon Sandoval and Steve Knotek, and also provided a timeline for the history of CCC from 1949–present. Throughout the past 25 years, the CCC network has provided me with a professional niche and group of colleagues and collaborators across the continents, who share some common values and consultation practices. We are gratified that our work has created visibility, acceptability, and competent research and practice in this approach that had been under-recognized within school psychology. The joy of learning and working with colleagues from a variety of cultures, places of research and practice, and life experiences has been a true highlight of my career.

School Psychology Review Special Issue on Multicultural and Cross-Cultural Consultation

Another significant experience was the period in the 1990s when I was writing about multicultural school consultation. This period culminated in the 2–3 years I spent developing the special issue of the School Psychology Review (2000) on multicultural and cross-cultural consultation in schools (Ingraham & Meyers, 2000a). This project emerged from the multicultural consultation work I was doing with my colleague and collaborator at California State University Northridge, Shari Tarver-Behring. Starting around 1995, she and I began collaborating about how we wanted to teach our students about multicultural consultation. She and I also had very young sons of the same age, and we connected across our campuses as mothers as well as university professors. We developed the 1998 call to the field, and published the contributions in the Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation (Tarver Behring & Ingraham, 1998).

At that time in my career, it was very difficult to find the sustained and focused time needed to dive deeply into my research and scholarship. Because our department had a need, I directed the school counseling program until 1996 (and again after I was promoted in 2001–2002), and I continued as a core faculty member in the school psychology program and in national professional association leadership. I was juggling roles in two graduate programs, maintaining professional roles and national certification in both school psychology and school counseling, and we did not have other tenure-track faculty in the school counseling program; so, I was tasked with mentoring all the school counseling trainees, as well as my school psychology advisees and mentees. My program and mentoring responsibilities were daunting. Additionally, given our 4–4 course teaching load and my role as a new mother that began in 1994, it was very hard to carve out time for research and writing.

When my son was a toddler, I realized I needed to create the context where I could give more energy to my research and writing in order to develop the record needed to go up for promotion and advance to full professor in the upcoming years. As a single parent raising my son, I was motivated to do what I needed to do to be eligible for promotion and a salary bump to support my family. I decided to really invest in my career and create the conditions to increase my peer-reviewed journal publication record. I hired additional childcare and worked hard to increase my scholarship time. I also wanted to develop a special issue on multicultural and cross-cultural consultation. I was eligible for a sabbatical in 1998–1999, and decided to take money out of my personal savings to fund myself for half time so that I could take a full year sabbatical (the university would cover 1 year at half-time pay, and the other half of my salary was self-funded) to dive fully into my research and scholarship. It took a few years to make the shift in my scholarly output; thus, I remained an associate professor for 12 years before being promoted to full in 2001.

When I first proposed a special issue in School Psychology Review on multicultural and cross-consultation, the review board said it was a timely topic, but they wanted me to partner with someone who had more journal editing experience. Mary Henning Stout (now Mary Clare), who had worked with me on Division 16 committees in the mid-1990s, was the Division 16 Vice President for Social and Ethnic Minority Affairs at the time I was the chair of the Multicultural Affairs Committee of Division 16 (1992–1996). I had been organizing round tables at conferences to share ideas with other faculty about teaching and mentoring from a multicultural perspective. In the late 1990s, Mary introduced me to Joel Meyers, who she thought might be open to the idea, and who had excellent experience as a journal editor. I had read Joel’s publications and really liked his work. He became a fabulous partner and mentor throughout our multiyear project, and I treasure our relationship and collaborations.

Our goals were to include a broad range of scholars who would help us reach a wide readership audience, create a space to report research that was already developing on the topic, and stimulate future research, training, and practice on multicultural issues in school consultation. We invited some prominent scholars, as well as newer researchers, to write manuscripts that went out for blind review, and we worked closely with many of the authors in responding to the feedback and revisions. At this time, I had been working on my own manuscript for the multicultural school consultation framework with the journal’s editor, Patti Harrison, who sent that out for separate blind review. It was challenging to integrate the reviewer feedback which called for significant shortening of the manuscript, among other requests. We were still in the era where people doing multicultural research had to respond to feedback from reviewers who didn’t always understand cultural issues and when behavioral, quantitative research perspectives and paradigms were a part of the dominant narrative.

It appears that this 2000 special issue made an important contribution to the literature in school psychology. It has been referenced a significant number of times and created the foundation for the next two decades of research, training, and practice on multicultural and cross-cultural school consultation. I was surprised and honored that my multicultural school consultation framework (Ingraham, 2000) was identified by Hazel, Laviolette, and Lineman (2010) as the most assigned reading in their national study of school psychology consultations courses. (See Ingraham, 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, to learn how the original work in 1998 and 2000 has progressed into its current global perspective.)

Treasured Relationships for Increased Cultural Learning

I am so very grateful to all of the students and faculty who I have mentored, taught, and worked and learned with over the years. I have been blessed with treasured relationships with students, graduates, and alumni, many of whom have become school psychology faculty or supervisors in the field. These talented and diverse individuals have taught me about their cultures, lived experiences, perspectives, traumas, and many forms of resilience. These important relationships made my learning and study of multicultural school psychology possible, and helped create the shared spaces where we could explore cross-cultural and intra-cultural issues and patterns.

My interest in learning about people of different cultures began with experiences when I was in high school and has continued to this day. I dated outside of my race, culture, and religion and was aware of how different cultural groups held differing interpretations of experiences. My high school Spanish teacher invited me to join his Alfonso Sastre (a Spanish playwright, essayist, and critic) Literature Club, and we read and discussed essays, plays, and novellas written in Spanish that had a very different perspective of life and death, compared with the literature we were reading in my English classes. I was cognizant of how relatively culturally homogenous my high school was, and I worked to arrange daylong school exchanges with students in other communities where the ethnic makeup was different from ours. We learned about points of commonality and difference, and I think it broadened the experiences of students from both high schools. In college, I had interracial relationships with boyfriends who came from Chinese and Palestinian backgrounds, in addition to those with European and European American, White backgrounds. Even my dissertation was based on the understanding that students of differing ages, cultures, and perspectives grounded their self-esteem on different aspects of their lives, consistent with what they valued. I have been an advocate of diversity for a long time.

My appreciation of diversity, different cultures, faiths, sexual identities, immigrations statuses, and people from different walks of life has led me to some wonderful learning opportunities, both within my personal and professional relationships. As a professor at SDSU, I was fortunate to have students from a rich tapestry of backgrounds, countries, cultures, and races. As I was teaching and mentoring others, I made it clear that I was also very open to learning, to hearing about how others saw my cultural biases surfacing, and to doing cultural plunges to experience groups and communities different from those in which I was raised. I was invited to local Native American Pow Wows and cultural events, weddings in Mexico, quinceaneras and other Latino cultural events, celebrations of Kawanza, African American events, Cambodian and Chinese New Year’s celebrations, Hmong family events, Gospel music performances and Black churches, events for undocumented families, multicultural celebrations, and much more. One of the fabulous benefits of working in a program with a very multicultural focus is that our school psychology students were extremely diverse. Some of our students grew up in other countries and came to the United States as young children; others had experienced extreme racial and educational injustices. Some of the students were brilliant, but were wrongly placed in special classes for slow learners as children because they were not yet fluent in English, their second or third language. In our program, we worked hard to create an inclusive environment, and encouraged students to tell their stories and reclaim their voices, pride, and power, and to learn about their first cultures, languages, and traditions. I could not have learned about the depth of some cross-cultural and diversity issues without learning from our students, faculty, and their families.

Mentoring and helping students embrace their cultural and professional identities was a big part of what we strove to do in our program. This meant really listening to their stories, celebrating their resiliencies, and helping to navigate the academic and professional worlds into which they were entering. It also meant being accessible, caring deeply, and blending therapeutic, multicultural and cross-cultural, and professional development approaches into how we worked with our students, their supervisors, and the children and families who they served. For some students and cultural backgrounds, it also meant working through their distrust of White people, professors, and others with perceived power. As a White professor, it frequently meant going through the testing phases of relationship building where students anticipated that I would be like other White educators who had oppressed or hurt them. I spent a great deal of energy mentoring and guiding people through the various hurdles and challenges they faced. One aspect of this mentoring involved students with research and professional presentations. I served as cheerleader and mentor for students who applied for various scholarships and encouraged them to present at research venues, in the community, and at professional conferences. I have mentored over 80 students in copresenting with me at national and state conferences, including video-taped rehearsals with feedback and successive approximation to build confidence, competence, and fluidity in presenting. Additionally, I supervised countless theses, doctoral projects, and special studies on topics of the students’ interests, invited students to participate on my research teams, and invited students to copublish with me. I am very proud of the graduates who have gone on to finish their doctorates, become university professors, serve as leaders in NASP, CASP, districts and SELPAs, and practicing school psychologists. I am grateful to the students and faculty who contributed so richly to my learning and development, and place a high value on these relationships in my own career development.

Collaborations with Faculty at Other Universities

In addition to the above collaborative work described earlier with Daniel Newman, I had engaged in numerous cross-university collaborations with colleagues. In the 1990s, Abi Harris and I collaborated on a consultation study looking at gender expectations. This was before the availability of the internet and video-conferencing, so we would sometimes have 2–3 h cross-country long-distance phone calls (expensive at the time), trying to get as much done as we could while her young daughter napped. We were Berkeley graduate students together years earlier and at the time of this collaboration, Abi was an Associate Professor at Fordham University. I was an Associate Professor at SDSU, and there was a 3-h time difference between us. Margaret Rogers (University of Rhode Island) was another long-distance collaborator, and we worked for several years on the Multicultural and Cross-Cultural Task Force in School Psychology, which she chaired. Evelyn Oka (Michigan State University) and I had met at conferences, and we collaborated in a cross-university project for 5 years where we engaged our students with each other in a cross-cultural, cross-university collaboration involving consultation. Evelyn and I also had sons about the same age, so we shared parenting experiences when we talked on the phone or at conferences, as well as some conference hotel rooms together with our sons. Emily Lopez (Queens College, SUNY) was another influential colleague and partner on committees. These four women were at similar levels in our careers and our collaborations helped us all cope with the challenges of being multicultural researchers and advocates, and women in the academy. We found ways to support each other through our professional and personal work, speaking out to make school psychology more inclusive of cultural diversity, and contributing to professional associations as well as the field. These collaborations with colleagues at other universities were instrumental in helping me gain perspectives outside of my immediate school psychology program. For example, Margie Rogers helped me learn that one’s creative energies are not unlimited and that it is necessary to be intentional about where and how to put energy. I am eternally grateful to Margie and the others who were willing to share a room at national conferences when I had Kyle with me!

Juggling Single Parenthood and a Professional Career

Many school psychologists are parents and face the challenges of maintaining and balancing productive careers and healthy families. Whether we work in schools as practicing school psychologists or as university professors, the job demands are intense and time-consuming. In my case, I was a single parent and sole provider for my family, with close family members 600 miles away.

One of my first experiences with this juggling was when my son, Kyle, was born a week later than anticipated. I had agreed to do a video-recorded interview for the Division 16 Conversation Series on Multicultural School Psychology in 1994 at the APA conference in Los Angeles, which was 2 weeks after he was born. We had some challenges with his health immediately after his birth, and I was having to go to the doctor every day to monitor his progress. I was so blessed to have my mother come stay with me for the first 4 weeks, taking one feeding shift at night so I could get a little sleep, and helping to make sure I was getting my nutrition. With the conference just 2 weeks after he was born, my mother came to APA with me and helped care for my son. I was nursing every 2 h, and my hormones were all over the place; my body was in the process of readjusting after a very long labor. The outside temperature was over 100°, and it is a wonder I was able to say anything halfway intelligible for the video interview! Needless to say, I was not at my cognitive, articulate best for the interview, but just did the best I could under the circumstances.

APA was the first of many conferences where I brought Kyle with me, and we both learned how to navigate the travel and conference sessions. I am grateful to Margaret Rogers, Evelyn Oka, Sharon Missan, and others who were willing to share rooms with us. As Kyle got older, I learned how to bring novel toys (small ones for plane rides) and/or new books that Kyle was eager to read so that he had something interesting to do while we attended talks. This was interspersed by our play times in the hallways or parks, where he could run and laugh, in addition to our visits to museums or historical sites, etc. On the occasions where he did not join me, I had to hire overnight adult sitters to stay at our home and make sure he got off to school and to his various activities and events. It was expensive to pay for 24-h sitters for several conference days, in addition to the costs of attending the conferences. Sometimes I had to alternate between APA, NASP, CDSPP, AERA, since going to all each year was too expensive on my salary. At this time, there were still academic narratives about some people being on the “mommy track,” and like some of my colleagues, I took care not to talk about my parental roles too much and to work hard so that people would view me as a capable professional, able to be a competent, productive professor. Thankfully for newer generations, I see some great advances being made in this arena in today’s university norms, with much greater acceptance and even support for professors who are parents.

There was also the typical juggling that families face in getting their children to and from school and activities. Between grades 3–8, I drove Kyle to school and picked him up each day so he could participate in programs for exceptionally gifted students. He also competed in academic competitions, played in the band, various sports, and participated in Boy Scouts (with weekly meeting and monthly outings) which he continued for 12 years all the way to getting his Eagle Scout award. Being a single mother who was committed to his development, I was very intentional about providing opportunities for my son to learn skills and go on outings with boys and men. He gained confidence and self-sufficiency through scouting events such as camping and extended backpacking treks. I found it interesting when some colleagues would say their spouse was going out of town and lamented that they were going to have to be a single parent for a weekend. I was always a single parent; that was my daily world. I also wanted to teach my son that women could do lots of things, so I was involved with being a merit badge counselor for his scouting troop, went on camping trips where I pitched our tent and handled our gear, fixed things around the home, and did not adhere to the “helpless female” norms. I wanted him to learn feminist values and respect for different gender identities and family constellations. Now in his mid-20s and in a committed relationship, I am proud that he learned to communicate about his feelings, work out conflicts, cook a few recipes, and show love and consideration for his girlfriend and partner.

During this time of the mid and late 2000s, we also faced the national recession and the financial crises that occurred. At the university, I was directing the School Psychology Program, and there were severe budget cuts to manage, work furloughs, and reduced salaries. This generated lots of stress and overwork, and pressure to save funds for Kyle’s college experiences. In 2008, our house burned, due to a fire that started in our neighbor’s attic. We lost a lot and had to live in an apartment for 18 months while they rebuilt. My primary concern during this time was to provide stability for my son and help our family recover. The year 2008 was also when I began directing the School Psychology Program after Valerie Cook-Morales, who had been director for many years, decided it was too much work for the compensation. Needless to say, I was juggling a lot professionally and personally at the time.

Around 2010, I was working to finish up the insurance issues and move back into our townhouse. I had the opportunity to engage in an amazing community effort with SDSU faculty colleagues, school and community leaders, and students and families. We were working with a group (including faculty colleagues Gerald Monk, marriage and family therapy; Audrey Hokoda, child and family development; principal Godwin Higa, and our many partners) to build a healthy community and bring restorative practices and trauma-informed care to a very diverse high need, high crime, low-resourced community, and school. This started an intensive and wonderfully rewarding community psychology collaborative project, where I taught some of my classes at an elementary school and organized assignments that the school psychology graduate students could do at the site. This ended up developing into an amazing project where I led a group of graduate students, and we worked with a community group to change the school climate and systemically bringing restorative practices and trauma-informed services to the school, training the teachers, parents, and students, working to empower all involved. We conducted many of the trainings and meetings in Spanish, the primary language of most of the parents, and had a living laboratory in which I could teach our school psychology students. (For more information about the project and the outcomes we achieved, see Ingraham et al., 2016.)

I took a sabbatical in 2013, during my son’s high school years, and I tried to be more available during the bumpy years of his adolescence. Like most families of the time, we battled over typical things like screen time, late night messages and texts from friends, and getting enough sleep. I had to cut back some on my professional association work and give more time to this transformational phase in my son’s life. When it was time for him to go to college in 2012, I had the financial responsibility of helping to pay for college as well as the long-distance parental worries all families have when their kids to go off on their own to college; however, I had more available time to put into my research and writing. I entered a very productive time of scholarship and research, and was invited to write several book chapters and co-guest edited the special issue of JEPC.

Has my gender ever been a factor in my career? I believe there were some ways that gender was a factor in my career, before my undergraduate time, in graduate school, and into my career as a professor of school psychology. As I was a senior in high school and was interviewing for the prized Regent’s Scholarship at UC Davis, I clearly remember the experience of walking into the room of mostly men who constituted the interview panel. I was only 17 years old and remember being nervous to be facing this large panel of powerful professors and people much senior to myself. I described my desire to study psychology and child development and my passion for assuring that all children had educational opportunities and a strong foundation. One of the interviewers asked me how I could be considering being a professional woman and also so committed to early childhood development, and what would I do when I became a parent? Wouldn’t I want to be home with the children when I became a parent, he inquired? I replied with something like: I thought it as possible to do both, but I don’t recall the details. What I do remember is that, after the interview, I felt indignant that, at a prestigious college scholarship interview, I was being asked to justify why they should support my education if I was going to be a parent. They were asking me if I were really dedicated to child development, why would I consider being a working parent? Were they asking the male candidates this same line of questioning? Somehow, this did not disqualify me, and I was offered the academic scholarship, which was a tremendous financial support to my undergraduate education. The experience, though, left a lasting impression on me.

During my time at Berkeley, I was aware of differential gender expectations. I recall knowing just a few professors who were women in a male dominated environment, although the doctoral student body had a number of women present. In my experiences as a graduate student attending social events with graduate students from other disciplines, I remember feeling like I needed not to be seen as too accomplished as a female seeking to date males. I was invited to both law school and MBA student parties, and I felt like the males were eager to talk with me and share about themselves, but as soon as I mentioned I was a doctoral student in School Psychology, they drifted away. It felt like they were intimidated by my level of education.

I recall asking Nadine Lambert about this issue one time as I was starting my career and she said that her gender was not really an issue for her. Later in her career, she looked back and said that indeed gender was an issue in some ways in that the people in power were mostly men.

I remember one experience potentially related to gender when I was in graduate school. In the School of Education at UC Berkeley during the time I attended, most of the tenured faculty members were men. I was a graduate student representative on a policy committee led by senior faculty. At one meeting, where we were discussing the policies for assigning office space to faculty, I commented that I wanted to ask something potentially concerning, and a full professor (whom I perceived as rather sexist) with lots of power replied that nothing I could ask would be concerning, and I said “Is that because I am a student or a woman?” After the meeting, I was talking with another professor who had attended the meeting and expressed my worry that I might have said something that could come back to hurt me, and he said to come to him if there were negative repercussions. What I was suggesting was to allocate space according to who was there most of the time. Of course, this was rather radical given that the existing policy where space was allocated based on the hierarchy or status of the person, such that some offices were assigned to faculty with a lot of seniority who were rarely there, and yet some people who worked often on campus were not able to get enough office space in the building. Typically, I was much more tactful and diplomatic in making suggestions or contributions in meetings, and I don’t know what got into me to be so bold and direct.

I had many different roommates and housemates during my undergraduate and graduate school years, so I was used to sharing the chores, bills, and domestic tasks as well as the conversation and space. As a young single assistant professor, I had my own apartment and did not have a spouse or partner to help with the home duties, so I learned, for the first time in my life, to live by myself. Almost all the faculty members in my department were married and significantly older than I was, so my home life was quite different from theirs. Additionally, most of the male faculty had a wife or partner who cooked dinners, so my experience of shopping and cooking for myself was different from the departmental norm. I lacked models who integrated being women, scholars, mentors, and mothers.

Has my ethnicity even been a factor in my career? I ask myself this question because it relates to why a White woman like me got into multicultural SP. While I had many White privileges, I remember being very aware of the economic disparities in my community as I was growing up, with some of my peers coming from much larger homes and having much greater economic opportunities; however, I grew up with the aspiration to do something meaningful. Making money or climbing social rungs were not key motivators in my career decisions.

Finding my way as a straight single White female trying to learn the culture of academe was daunting. I wished for models for guidance. My family wanted to be supportive, yet they were 600 miles away and unfamiliar with the culture and expectations of academics. They also were unfamiliar with my chosen area of study. At the same time, I was aware of how my heterosexual and White identities afforded me privileges, and being a single gay woman of color could have been much harder. Unlike some faculty of color, I did not have to face the constant comments of, “oh, you are a faculty member?” even though some said I seemed to be so young to be a professor.

My program at SDSU was committed to a multicultural emphasis, and we were dedicated to bringing the cultural context to the forefront of discussions. As we attracted and recruited a more diverse student body, our students became more confident in challenging the faculty, White privilege, and the power structures that had minoritized their communities. I had the opportunity to work with graduate students from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and identities, and I learned the familiar patterns of testing that they did with the White faculty; they often pushed to see how far the faculty person would bend, challenged the implicit power structures, and tried to determine if I was really committed to learning their story or if it was just nice talk. As faculty, we had to walk-the-walk as well as talk-the-talk on a daily basis, and again each year as a new cohort would put us through their tests. Did we really get it? How would we respond to accusations of bias, oppression, colonization, and similar themes when we really got into discussions? Each year, it felt as though we would repeat these cycles of building trust, credibility, cultural humility, mutual respect, and genuine interest. They seemed to wonder, would I be an ally, advocate, partner in learning or change, or another dominating influence as students of color had experienced so many times in the past?

My career has been relatively special and unique because I was hired as the culture of my university was changing (with aspirations to become a Research 1 Institution), I was expected to publish and develop an active research program before the institution had the structural or cultural supports in place to meet these expectations. We needed a great deal of internal motivation, self-discipline, and endurance to teach four courses each semester in a demanding graduate program, in addition to advising student special studies, mentoring first-generation university students, working in a 24/7 context of faculty availability for program matters, and then writing on weekends and vacations. My colleagues at other universities helped me learn about the culture of academe and what faculty at other places were getting in terms of research mentorship and support. It would have been far more financially lucrative to have changed universities a few times, with pay increases with each move, and/or move into administrative roles, but I decided to spend 36+ years at a single university as a program faculty member.

Much of my learning was trial and error, and I wish I had known more about the trajectory for a successful academic career. I wished I had known what the benchmarks were, how to establish career goals and strategies to reach them, and how much one’s teaching load makes a difference in the time, grant funding, and energies needed to sustain an active research program. While my dissertation was cutting edge at the time, it was difficult to keep pace with the rate of research other scholars were producing given my teaching load and departmental culture. It was hard to compete with researchers in my field who had only two to three course a year to teach, doctoral students with whom to collaborate and copublish, and well-oiled research environments for getting research grants, establishing a research lab, etc. I wish I had learned more about writing for publication while in graduate school, the journal review processes, and ways to build a research team.

Some disappointments and frustrations along the way included an award-winning dissertation that was never published. At the time I was working on my dissertation, my chair said I had enough data and areas of study to be able to publish all I needed to get tenure. Yet, with my responsibilities for teaching and program development, there was never enough time to turn the lengthy dissertation into articles for publication. Additionally, by not publishing it soon after completion, the field moved and shifted so much that others were beginning to do work along some of the same lines, and my work was not as novel as it was at the time of my study.

Another frustration was that I was working in a workaholic program culture and a teaching-focused department where self-care, balance, and research were not salient for some with whom I worked regularly. This made it hard to learn to find my own personal and professional balance, set boundaries for myself, and devote enough time needed for a research program and also find my life partner. We put so much energy into developing the school psychology program, creating innovative coursework, and doing student mentoring that it impacted our health and well-being. Additionally, the program and schedule were always changing from semester to semester, frequently with new course content and teaching schedules. We held days and days of program faculty retreats as we redesigned new curriculum, processed complex cross-cultural issues that arose, and created new structures and processes for the school psychology program. With the awarding of new grants, different faculty were tapped to fill in and teach different courses, and there was little stability in my teaching assignment, which made it hard to develop a rhythm and reusable course materials and notes. At SDSU, I taught over 30 different graduate courses, including some that were yearlong sequences, with students in school psychology, school counseling, marriage and family therapy, multicultural counseling, teacher education, teachers of special education, the deaf and hard of hearing counseling program, and rehabilitation counseling. A great deal of time and thought went into developing innovative and challenging courses where students learned research, theories, and applications of these to a variety of professional practices.

Several other factors are worth mentioning. As articulated earlier, two significant personal/professional factors in my life were my father dying at the age of 46 when I was almost 25, and my status as a working single parent in a department with mostly married spouses. Like many universities, we also faced some severe budget cuts and shortfalls which impacted our workload, stress level, salaries, class sizes, and work environment and climate. While I was fortunate to work with colleagues who shared my passion for school psychology and educational equity, our interpersonal and working styles were quite different, and, at times, this created stressors.

With hindsight, I see now that school psychology was the perfect career for me to pursue. I love the opportunities and rewarding work it entails, and there are always new challenges and areas of study to satisfy one’s desire to learn and grow. I would definitely become a university professor of school psychology again.

There are some things I would recommend doing differently though, and I hope readers can use these as useful lessons learned. I regret not developing more of an identity outside of work and the program in my early years as a faculty member. In some ways, we were “married to the program,” which left little time for finding my partner for marriage. Weekdays, weekends, and vacations were often booked with program work, phone calls, emails, and developing documents for the school psychology program. I think it would have also helped not to try to do it all—professional association leadership, massive curricular development, directing two academic programs and disciplines, teaching and mentoring, working to make a difference in local schools and the larger profession, doing program evaluations for districts and multiple projects, and trainings. For example, I directed the school counseling program for 5 years, including in 1988–1989 before I went up for tenure, and then again as I approached promotion to professor in 2000 was a lot to try to accomplish.

Another regret I have is not taking longer leave time when my son was born. My department chair led me to believe that my maternity leave options were to start back at the beginning of the fall semester (in August) or I would have to finance my own parental leave after the 6 weeks of authorized parental leave was up, which I could not afford to do as a single parent. Thus, I returned to work just weeks after my son was born and tried to learn how to juggle being a parent and directing a graduate program and a grant, while teaching courses. I was blessed to have my mother come help me for the first month after my son was born. Since I had willingly decided to become a single parent, I felt that I had to tough it out and not complain. Needless to say, it was a bumpy time for me, but I am proud of the fact that I was always there for our nighttime routines and to tuck my son into bed every night for the first 2 years of his life; thus, he had excellent stability, love, and bonding. As he got older and I had to attend conferences, I would either bring him with me or hire the same adult sitter to stay overnight at our home, which was quite expensive. Later, there were also times when I had to teach classes from 7 to 10 p.m., and I needed to hire childcare to help put him to bed. I really missed our bedtime book routine, and of course, I felt terribly guilty for not being there. Now I see parents take several months or even a year off when they have a newborn, and I am glad the present-day policies are more family friendly than those during my time.

Summary and Suggestions

Having this opportunity to look back on my career has been an insightful and reflective process. I can see places where I accomplished a great deal, and I feel proud of the contributions I have made to the profession. At the same time, it sharpens my awareness about things I wish I had done differently and what I would wish for those at earlier stages of this fascinating profession. I would recommend finding mentors who can offer guidance in different aspects of one’s career, for example, female role models who work to combine their intellect, femininity, productivity, compassion, and ability to lead. I suggest trying to find people who can serve as professional role models for building an active research program, conducting research and scholarship, writing for publication, grant development, using time and activities efficiently, humility and compassion, being a dedicated parent and scholar, and modeling the values that are near and dear to one’s heart. Different people can serve as mentors for different aspects of one’s career; you don’t need to have one person who does it all.

School psychology is a career path that offers many different options and choices along the way. There are always new ideas and issues to explore, different ways to conceptualize and to think about how concepts, constructs, processes, and contexts influence each other. There are many real issues in the world to try to address and solve. There are so many aspects to the profession that it is always possible to find a venue that offers the challenges and satisfaction needed to sustain a long and rewarding career. I am glad I did.