Interview with Sachiko Oates, Ed.D. on Completing her Ed.D. Dissertation from Arizona State University

About Dr. Sachiko Oates, Ed.D.: Sachiko Oates works as a Technical Assistance Consultant for an international not-for-profit organization, where she conducts qualitative research on education and provides professional development and training programs for educators. She is the winner of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate’s (CPED) 2024 Dissertation of the Year Award. Her dissertation, entitled From Resilience to Empowerment: Immigrant-Origin Adult Learners’ Journeys towards Postsecondary Education, investigates the unique experiences, challenges, and educational needs of immigrant adult learners at a California community college.

Prior to joining the research organization, Dr. Oates worked for 17 years at Santa Barbara City College, first as an English as a Second Language (ESL) Instructor and an Educational Technology Leader before stepping into the role of Director of Non-Credit Programs for three years. She earned her law degree from Kansai University in Japan, before completing her Master’s in Educational and Instructional Technology at California State University, Fullerton. She completed her Ed.D. in Education Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University (ASU).

Interview Questions

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Why did you decide to pursue an Ed.D. in Education Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University (ASU)? What were your career goals upon enrolling, and how did you see the Ed.D. at ASU as helping you to achieve these goals?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] I am an immigrant who learned English as a second language. I grew up in Japan and moved to California from Japan as an adult. I was teaching English in Japan, which is where I met my husband. I moved to California with him, which is where I had to start all over in my career. In Japan, I had earned a law degree, but in California that did not really translate to meaningful work.

Hoping to get a job quickly once here in America, I enrolled in a Career and Technical Education (CTE) program at my local community college. I started working in retail, but I always wanted to go back to teaching. Pursuing education as a career was intimidating, as I was not from here and English was not my first language. Eventually, however, my love for teaching was just too strong. I earned my TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate from UC Santa Barbara, and got hired as an instructor at the community college where I had initially taken classes, and where I would ultimately conduct my Ed.D. research study.

I started working at this community college 5 years after moving to America, and was there for 17 years, first as an English as a Second Language (ESL) Instructor, then as an Educational Technology Leader, and ultimately stepping into the role of Director of Non-Credit Programs. My time working at the community college, teaching adult immigrant English language learners, is how I got started in education leadership. As I was teaching, I wanted to do more. We were conducting this technology integration at work, and I really wanted to learn more about how schools are integrating educational technology both within and outside of the classroom, especially for adult immigrant learners.

I decided to earn my Master’s in Educational Technology from California State University (CSU) Fullerton, and they had this fully online program. By then, I had two kids, and I also had to work, so I could not take time off to go to attend a full-time, on-campus program. I chose an online program, which naturally led me to doing more at the community college. Eventually, I had the opportunity to apply for the administrative Director of Non-Credit Programs position. At that time, it was very exciting because I felt like I could impact more students that way.

About one year into my new role, COVID hit, and it revealed a huge inclusion gap in our instructional technology infrastructure, especially in the areas of digital access and support for immigrant adult students. It was glaring, the level of difficulty adult immigrant students faced to continue their studies in a completely virtual environment. Seeing this showed me that I needed to gain more skills in order to support this student population better, and to become a better leader in the context I was in. That is when I started looking for an Ed.D. program.

I understood that the Ed.D., versus the Ph.D., focused more on preparing working educators for more leadership responsibilities. Arizona State University (ASU) had an online Ed.D. in Leadership and Innovation, and their program fit all of my criteria. It was online, flexible, affordable, and focused on actually making quality education accessible for all learners. ASU’s program also has a reputation for being innovative, and one aspect of it that I liked was the Leader-Scholar Community (LSC) groups that were integral to students’ second and third years in the program. LSC groups created a collaborative, community-based type of learning environment even in a remote context. This strongly appealed to me, so I applied, got in, and decided to attend.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] You mentioned you worked at your community college in California for 17 years and saw a lot of what adult immigrant learners experienced, what their needs were, and how their needs were not being met in some areas. Could you elaborate on how you arrived at your specific research question, including the experiences and observations that drove you to this area of research?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] I treasured my time working with adult immigrant learners in my community, because I really learned a lot from them. They are very resilient and wise, and during my years working with them I saw many of them be successful in non-credit, tuition-free programs. But when it came to transferring to tuition-based, credit-bearing courses, adult immigrant learners faced many challenges.

That was what started me on this journey — I wanted higher education or postsecondary education to be more accessible, especially for adult immigrant learners. I identified strongly with this mission because, as an immigrant from Japan, I faced similar barriers. When I saw that our community college system was not adequately supporting adult immigrant learners, I wanted to understand, “What are the main barriers or challenges adult immigrant learners face, and what can we do about them?”

The data I initially collected revealed challenges such as the need to balance family obligations with a job while also enrolled in a degree program, concerns about financing a postsecondary education, and adjusting to rigorous coursework and other requirements. But when I started the Ed.D. program, it was also around the time that the community college I worked at was experiencing several racist incidents on campus, and I realized that there were deeper issues with the campus culture and climate. This environment did not feel safe for some of the students.

I decided to shift the direction of my dissertation research. I conducted two cycles of action research, focusing on the deeper cultural issues within higher education. At the same time, I was learning more about critical theories in class and different types of research methods, particularly qualitative methods. Those courses really changed my thinking about and design of my dissertation.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Your dissertation incorporates Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR). Could you elaborate on CPAR and the qualitative research you conducted to investigate the campus climate on the community college’s campus?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] In CPAR, the study participants are co-researchers. There is no researcher dictating what is going to happen in the study; instead, study participants are co-leads of the research project and therefore part of the decision-making at each step. It was important to me that I was not just studying a group of people from afar and writing about them. I wanted this to be a collective project where my study participants and I took action together to investigate this problem on our campus.

Partway through my dissertation research, I left my role as Director of Non-Credit programs and accepted a new job as a consultant. Nevertheless, I had excellent connections at the community college. I leaned on these connections when recruiting adult immigrant students to participate in my study. I reached out to ESL instructors at the college, and visited classes on-campus a few times to let students know about my research project. Several of my colleagues also distributed announcements of my study and a Google Form for students to sign up if they were interested. I ultimately assembled a group of six participants, or co-researchers.

As a group, my co-researchers and I all set out to investigate our community college’s campus climate and institutional practices through the lens of our own lived experiences as students at the institution. The design of our qualitative research study was narrative-based. Participants, including myself, conducted a self-reflection on their education path by creating journey maps that illustrated the highs and lows of our educational experiences, the principal challenges we faced, our successes, and what our support systems were. The journey maps were flexible in format: some participants used computer programs to visualize their story, and one student even drew a map by hand.

Afterwards, we shared our journey maps with one another and discussed common themes across our experiences as immigrant students. We made note of the common elements of our journeys on shared bulletin boards, and identified the strengths we leveraged to get where we are now. From there, we wrote detailed stories about key experiences in our journey, using our journey map and group discussions as guides. These stories, like the journey map, could be in a wide range of formats. It was each co-researcher’s decision to choose how they wanted to present their stories. For example, one participant wrote a poem, while another shared their story through graphics. From these in-depth narratives, my co-researchers and I explored the broader challenges that adult immigrant learners face, such as institutional and cultural barriers.

We wanted to share our findings with our greater community, particularly at the community college. After discussing how we wanted to share our stories and our findings, we decided on an artistic exhibit. One of my dissertation committee members was the Director of the Centers for Equity and Social Justice at our college, and she helped me find suitable venues on-campus. Our community college actually has three campuses, and so we hosted the exhibit at all three campuses over the course of three weeks. Our exhibit wove our stories together around common themes and discussion of the systemic issues we wanted to highlight.

Following the exhibit, I wrote up an analysis of findings, and identified several recommendations for community colleges and similar institutions to better support immigrant adult learners. These recommendations included providing training to educators on trauma-informed approaches to teaching. All of the co-researchers’ stories included serious traumatizing experiences. Other studies have also shown that adult learners and students of color have a higher trauma exposure, or a higher risk of being exposed to trauma. Preparing faculty and staff members in higher education settings to provide support is important, as is de-stigmatizing the act of reaching out for support.

Another recommendation concerned college support services and how they have room for improvement to tailor to the needs of adult learners in general, especially, adult immigrant students or ESL students. Furthermore, the recommendations included implementing culturally and linguistically responsive instruction in the classroom — ways of teaching, learning, and collaborating that support people from different cultures better. In our shared narratives, we found that many of us had experienced incidents where instructors were not prepared to provide optimal guidance to multilingual students, or to foster an environment where multilingual students felt comfortable asking questions. Thus, I recommended that teachers receive training in how to incorporate diverse learning methods and strategies that are culturally responsive.

When we held our exhibit at the three campus locations, there were a number of students who responded with their own stories. We also had faculty and staff members who told us, “We completely agree. We need to make sure that support services are advertised to all students so they can access it easily. Financial aid also needs to be more accessible.” While I could not keep track of the ripple effects of our project, I hope that the stories we shared and the work we did to analyze our collective experiences inspire other scholar practitioners to investigate problems of equity, inclusion, and accessibility in their educational settings.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Do you have any advice for current and prospective students who are just embarking on the dissertation journey or just starting their Ed.D.? What are some insights and pieces of advice that you could give them given your own experience working in action research and qualitative participatory research?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] I think finding a program that fits your needs is the most important factor. I did a lot of research to find a program that matched my needs and learning preferences very well. ASU’s Leader-Scholar Communities and focus on collaborative learning made their Ed.D. program a great fit for me. Find a program that matches your learning preferences, and whose courses and faculty can support your scholarly and professional interests.

While I encourage finding a program that will support your goals, my idea of what I wanted to do in my Ed.D. program and afterward changed. I am very thankful for all the courses I took in ASU’s program, because I learned a lot through those classes. The curriculum shifted my way of thinking and my understanding of what research is supposed to be. I entered the program with preconceived notions of what research could achieve, and that idea evolved and expanded as I progressed through the program. I am very grateful that I got this education because I am a different person because of it.

Another piece of advice I have is to find classmates who are supportive, and with whom you can build a smaller community of scholarly support while you work through classes and later your dissertations. I am still in contact with my friends from ASU, and I have visited them a few times. We all met in our second semester, and since then we have supported each other throughout our Ed.D. journey.

Balancing work, life, and a huge dissertation was not easy, and these connections were instrumental in keeping me motivated. We often met to vent and work on assignments together — even hopping on Zoom when the statistics part of our assignments had us all stumped. That student-to-student peer support was one of the most beautiful aspects of the program for me. Without those relationships — and the guidance of my professors — I would not be where I am today.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] How has your Ed.D. enriched your perspectives on research for educational equity and accessibility? Have your research perspectives translated to your current role?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] Yes and no. At my current workplace, I cannot conduct the same kind of small-scale study that was central to my dissertation. That being said, I am very lucky to be able to work on qualitative research concerning what institutions can do to support adult learners of color. The core mission behind my dissertation research and the research I conduct at work is the same. I am an advocate for more culturally and linguistically appropriate research, evaluation, and technical assistance practices at work. All of the research methods, theories, and best practices I learned through taking courses at ASU have helped me approach my work in humanizing ways.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] What have been some of your most rewarding experiences as an educator and an education leader?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] That is a big question. For me, the most rewarding part has been working with all of these wonderful students — primarily adult immigrant learners whom I have met as a community college ESL instructor and administrator. Meeting them and learning from them was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. I have worked with refugees and people from all over the world, and through learning about their diverse cultures, values, and strengths, I discovered the importance of human-to-human connection in education.

That is why I became so passionate about making their voices heard and treating them as co-researchers rather than merely subjects of study. Discovering participatory action research showed me that we could conduct research together, and that insight drove me to design my study in a collaborative way.

[OnlineEdDPrograms.com] Having worked for over 20 years in education and leadership, how do you see the future of education evolving — both in terms of the challenges it faces and the improvements underway? Do you see movements for diversity, equity, and inclusion — such as grassroots efforts for cultural inclusivity in education — gaining strength in the coming years?

[Dr. Sachiko Oates] That is a great question. Being in California, we are fortunate to have increasingly progressive policies that support diversity, equity and inclusion. I hope that continues. At the same time, negative rhetoric can be really harmful — I have seen firsthand how it can hurt real people. I do believe there are things within our power to change. We just need to start with what is in our own circle of influence. Just as negative actions create ripple effects, supportive energy can have a positive impact. Sharing our stories can spark change by reminding everyone that these students are real people. For educators, it is essential to maintain a strong moral compass and follow it — that is really all we can do.

Thank you, Dr. Sachiko Oates, for your excellent insight into the experiences of adult immigrant learners, and your inspiring research on how education leaders and scholar practitioners can better support multilingual and multicultural learners in higher education!