(photo credit Juan Carlo, VC Star)
It seemed more than fitting that the conversation at the heart of this story about Rio School District Superintendent John Puglisi (Education, Ph.D., ’01) took place while he was driving. For Puglisi seems like someone always in motion, always driving towards a goal, yet ever focused on the journey, not the destination. In fact, those last words are the hallmark of one of his recent undertakings, The River Literacy Project, something he has been working on with Distinguished Professor Emeritus Judith Green, one of his Gevirtz School mentors, for 20 years. “It’s an international, inquiry-based project,” he explained, “a way to build a better bridge between educational research and teachers in the classroom.”
Taking “How can we help the river find its way for the next 100 years?” as its guiding question, The River Project suggests that as students, teachers, classrooms, and communities learn more about their local rivers as well as rivers around the world while engaging in collaborative projects connecting localities to the global community, the world environment will be advanced for the next 100 years. The theory of action weaves Literacy Learning as a critical focus of the project, or, as Puglisi puts it, “With Judith involved, there’s a lot of complexity demand there.”
Not that Puglisi doesn’t see the challenges of education as complex himself. Considering his decades in the field, he’s noticed that the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened ideas he himself has had, “It’s time for more learning by and with people rather than to people. How can we see things as more open-ended, contextualized, focused on deeper learning, while being student-focused?” So Puglisi is moving Rio schools away from that standardized model, while also making sure his Oxnard district, despite its low income status, became 1:1 (one device per student, even more important now during pandemic-caused school from home).
Much of that work connects to the promotion of the 5 C’s—Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Citizenship, and Creativity. According to Puglisi, Rio went looking for nationwide networks of like-minded schools and discovered EdLeader21, where they “began to beg those questions—should schooling always be about the subject matter and test scores?” Something definitely needed to change, for as Puglisi puts it, “The corporate world said, ‘You’re sending us all these people who had all As, but then these kids ask us where the test is and there is no test.’ They didn’t know how to solve problems.”
Similarly, Rio is also part of the STEM to STEAM movement, for as Puglisi explains, “Arts are really critical to an emancipatory, high-leverage learning frame.” So Rio schools are sure to offer music, theater, dance, technological arts. Puglisi himself has a fine arts and music background—you can hear some of his singing and guitar playing on his very full superintendent page on the Rio website—and likes to think of technology in its broadest sense, not just computers, but amps, lithography, digital mixers. “When kids develop their literacies better, then they can use other tools,” he says. “Science and technology offer windows of opportunity that are less conventional and more liberatory.”
In addition to his work as Rio superintendent, Puglisi teaches as an adjunct professor at Cal Lutheran and Cal State Channel Islands in educational leadership. By teaching courses in topics like educational policy and school law, he feels he can “continue to contribute to those who step up to leadership roles.” His Gevirtz ties also continue to pull—in addition to his work with Judith Green, he’s done projects with Danielle Harlow and Rebeca Mireles Rios, among others. He then points to “the many kids from this neighborhood who went up to UCSB, got their degrees, and came back here as teachers.” Puglisi likes using the metaphor of a research tree—at one point talking of how Judith Green is a strong branch of his that has connected him to many other scholars and practitioners—but he also says, “UCSB is also a tree, and its nurturing and opportunities are really rich.”