BIOGRAPHIES

PROGRAM PRINCIPLES


Virginia Lea, President / Executive Director

Virginia Lea is committed to critical multicultural, anti-racist, and educultural education. She sees educulturalism as a means to facilitate awareness of self, and an understanding of the way culture and society works. She is committed to social justice activism to co-create alternative ways of living together in the world.

Virginia is currently an associate professor of education in a teacher credential program and the education masters program at Sonoma State University in Northern California. She integrates educulturalism into the courses she teaches: “Multicultural Pedagogy,” “School and Society,” “Social Studies in a Multicultural Society” and “The Reflective Educator.” She develops educultural curricula, with a focus on art, film, and narrative.

Virginia identifies with her European (French, Irish and Scandinavian) and Arab (Syrian) roots, and as an ally of people struggling for liberation from historical and current systems of oppression such as neo-colonialism, slavery, neo-liberalism, racism, classism, and sexism. Her diverse social and cultural experiences in her native England, France, North Africa, the West Indies, Canada, and the United States of America, have contributed to a lifelong commitment to social justice.

Virginia has more than 30 years of classroom experience, at the middle school, high school, and college levels. She has published several articles and co-edited two books: Identifying Race and Transforming Whiteness in the Classroom, with Judy Helfand (2004), published by Peter Lang; and Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom: Critical Educultural Teaching Approaches to Social Justice Activism, with Erma Jean Sims (2008), also published by Peter Lang.


Babatunde Lea, Program & Artistic Director

Babatunde Lea is an internationally celebrated drummer, performer and recording artist. He has appeared in many major national and international jazz festivals and in top jazz clubs throughout the world.

Babatunde also lead seminars/clinics at many institutions of learning in the United States and abroad. His musical compositions and performances are educulturally inspired. His recordings—including Sweet Unseen: Summoner of the Ghost, March of the Jazz Guerrillas, Soul Pools, and Level of Intent—have been critically acclaimed.

Babatunde also has more than 30 years of classroom experience, at the primary, middle school, high school, and college levels. He develops educultural curricula, with a focus on music. Please click on Music Programs to learn more about Babatunde Lea’s work as an educultural facilitator.

Babatunde has also contributed a chapter to Virginia’s book, Undoing Whiteness in the Classroom: Critical Educultural Teaching Approaches to Social Justice Activism, with Erma Jean Sims (2008), published by Peter Lang.

To learn more about Babatunde Lea and his recordings, click on the following links: www.babatundelea.com; www.myspace.com/babatundelea; www.ixtlanartists.com and www.motema.com.

Reginald Major (Director)
Reginald Major, Lecturer Emeritus, San Francisco State University, is an author and journalist who served as a faculty member of the Black Studies Department, School of Ethnic Studies. He retired from teaching in 1983, and is at present writing a series of remembrances.

Mr. Major is an author of one of the earliest books about the Black Panther Party, A Panther is a Black Cat. He also wrote, Justice in the Round, a book on the Angela Davis trial. He has been a regular contributor to the Pacific News Service, where he was a member of the Urban Task Force and the San Francisco Sun Reporter, a Black weekly newspaper.

Mr. Major has reported on both domestic and African affairs for several years. In 1977, 1978 and 1979, Major covered the Organization of African Unity (OAU) meetings in Libreville, Gabon; Khartoum, Sudan; and Monrovia, Liberia, as a Correspondent for the National Newspaper Publisher's Association and the Sun Reporter.

He has also reported on the East African Community for Le Monde Diplomatique, and served as Corresponding Editor for New African magazine. Mr. Major was the West Coast Bureau Chief for Black Audio News, a radio news service, and has reported news for both radio and television.

His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Black Scholar, The Nation, Essence, Black Enterprise, New Africa magazine, Mother Jones, the Hong Kong Standard, Bunte Magazine (West Germany), Le Monde Diplomatique, and numerous U.S. newspapers.

Ana Jaime (Director)
Ana Jaime is a graduate of St. Mary's College of California in the field of art and received her teaching credential with a bilingual emphasis from Sonoma State University.

She is currently enrolled in the Masters Program for Teaching Leadership at St. Mary's College. Ana taught at Admiral Farragut/Mare Island Elementary School in Vallejo for 10 years at the first, second and third grade levels.

She worked with the Vallejo City Unified School District as a bilingual tutor at the junior high and high school level for 2 years, as well as at St. Vincent's Elementary School as a teacher’s aide in the 4th and 6th grades.

Ana now teaches in Vacaville. She has three sons: Cruz, Emanuel, and Isaias, who reside with her in Vallejo, California.

Kelly Woods (Director)
David Bass (Director)
Denise Pate (Director)

Erma Jean Sims (Program Facilitaor)
Erma Jean Sims is a lecturer in education at Sonoma State University. She received her Juris Doctor (J.D.) in Law from the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She uses her classroom as a social justice laboratory, raising the consciousness of pre-service teachers about the complexities of racism and whiteness and empowering them to engage in social justice activism.