We often become what we see, and for Anita Goble, what she saw in her daughter’s classrooms changed the trajectory of her life.
“She got the idea for being a teacher from volunteering in my kindergarten class,” says Goble’s daughter and SCU teaching professor in the School of Education & Counseling Psychology, Cheryl Bowen. “She loved working with children.”
Goble went to college as a first-generation student and then went on to teach in San Jose public schools for 16 years—inspiring her daughter’s work and generations of Santa Clara students thanks to a gift funding research. Already, 18 awards have funded SCU student research, including trips to see how to best support children in traditionally under-resourced communities.
Bowen and her brother learned what goes into teaching by watching their mother work. “She brought home papers to grade. She taught me how to grade papers,” Bowen says. “We grew up learning how hard it is to be a teacher.”
Bowen calls it a passion for the mind that she inherited from her mother. Goble was born in Oklahoma and moved to Salinas, Calif., among the thousands who migrated west from the plains during the hard times of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.
As a child, Bowen spent many summers with Goble’s parents in Salinas, learning about the difficulties of migration. Inspired by her mother’s love of teaching and life, Bowen chose to teach herself.
At Santa Clara, she leads her own education students as they research the factors that help modern migrant students excel—neighborhood, parent, and community involvement. Each of the children, as her mother also saw them, is a gift. It’s the vision Goble had in that kindergarten classroom that continues to show what we can be.