By Kristin L. Gustafson, Teaching Standards Chair, University of Washington-Bothell
gustaf13@uw.edu

Just hours before the memorial service for Hazel Dicken-Garcia in June, I sat with four of her graduate students eating one of her favorite treats: a chocolate croissant from St. Paul’s Bread and Chocolate. As the sugar revved my body, I also felt a different rush. It was as if Dicken-Garcia—Hazel to all of us—was with us during a moment that would make her proud. Somewhat effortlessly, our conversation moved to scholarship. Soon we each jumped into a conversation to argue separately the merits and rigor of qualitative research and encourage one of my former classmates with her current research project. Sitting there with the warm sun on all of us, I could see Dicken-Garcia’s handiwork. It was not just our clarity about methodology that struck me. It was also the bond that stretched across geography and time and held us fast.

I’d come back to my home state of Minnesota for the service, a lunch with graduate school friends, and, as it turned out, a chocolate croissant. Dicken-Garcia changed my life in three important ways. She showed me how to be both fallible and excellent in teaching. She fed my insatiable appetite for questions that could be answered and honed with clarity and rigor. She taught me how to integrate family and career.

During the memorial service, Dr. Kate Edenborg’s words about our mentor—one she met when she was 21 years old as a new graduate student and worked with for her master’s and PhD at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication—wove into the words of others.

 She had high standards and pushed all of us to meet them. She nudged me into writing my first    conference paper and then crafting my first conference presentation. Along with that came my first plane ride. She offered to share a hotel room with me since she knew I was stretching my graduate assistant salary as far as it could go. We chatted about our lives while sitting on our beds in the room. I can still see Hazel sitting with her legs curled underneath her as we talked. It was then I realized that she was more than a teacher, more than an advisor, she was a friend.

Edenborg [https://wwwprod.uwstout.edu/directory/edenborgk], now an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Professional Communication and Emerging Media at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, shared with me photographs of physical things that Dicken-Garcia left behind for her—a plant now in her office windowsill, boxes of teaching and research materials, papers about women in communication, AEJMC newsletters, and two typewriters.

“She was kind of curating things,” Edenborg said. “It said a lot about how she perceived us.”

Edenborg, who came to the university as a first-generation student, said she had no one to ask: How does this work? What is this whole world of academia? Dicken-Garcia guided her through these questions and helped her, and others, identify inequities in media no matter how unintentional. “She helped her students take a step back and understand it through a historical context,” Edenborg said.

Now the boxes of materials she got from Dicken-Garcia over the years sit in Edenborg’s closet—old papers marked with a red pen, dissertation pages with track changes, lecture notes for editing classes, different people’s theses and dissertations, conference papers she gathered about trends of women in journalism, and more. During a recent move from one house to another, Edenborg let go of two of the seven boxes; she reflected on the archives and archival choices she made. “She passed them off because she thought it would be useful to me,” Edenborg said. “I’ve kept them because they were hers.”

And then in October, our History Division chair, Dr. Erika Pribanic-Smith, announced yet another of Dicken-Garcia’s gifts passed on. Dicken-Garcia gave more than $28,000 to the Division. Our new thesis award—now called the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in Journalism or Mass Communication History—will include a $200 prize paid out of the interest of the gift and split between the student author and thesis adviser. Pribanic-Smith said that the Division is also exploring other ways to honor Hazel’s memory while benefiting the Division’s members and its goals.

“As our members who were Hazel’s students can attest, Hazel was passionate about teaching and mentoring young scholars,” Pribanic-Smith wrote in an email to Division members. “We can think of no better way to honor her memory and create a lasting legacy than to reward outstanding student scholarship while recognizing the tireless efforts of faculty who mentor master’s students.”

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs like the one discussed here to share with one another. As teaching chair, I continue to invite you to share your best practices that encourage pedagogies of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice. Send them to me at gustaf13@uw.edu.

Photo provided by Kate Edenborg

About a month before her death, Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia gave her former advisee, Dr. Kate Edenborg, an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Professional Communication and Emerging Media at the University of Wisconsin Stout, two typewriters. It was one of Edenborg’s many visits, and her daughter Grace had joined her. Grace said something to Dicken-Garcia about a typewriter. And by the time they left the house, Edenborg had two typewriters—one for her daughter and one for her. “My daughter sees the value of that technology of a non-touch screen in creating communication,” Edenborg said of the one that went to her daughter. The smaller and older of the two—the one pictured here—is one Dicken-Garcia likely used when she was a graduate student at University of Wisconsin Madison. “It’s at that time in her life when she was discovering what she was doing and was young.”

Photo provided by Kate Edenborg

Dr. Hazel Dicken-Garcia passed on boxes of teaching and research materials marked “Kate” to her former advisee, Dr. Kate Edenborg, an associate professor of Journalism and Mass Communication and Professional Communication and Emerging Media at the University of Wisconsin Stout. Additionally, Edenborg kept papers like this one—papers marked up by hand and via track changes. In these writings, Edenborg can hear the lessons of Dicken-Garcia and other professors from over the years: Is this an answerable question?