Warmed summer sand morphed around 17-year-old Julie Pedersen’s feet like memory foam as she stepped along the beaches of the Chicago Park District. The sun tanned her Irish skin as she settled in a spot to read for the rest of her shift.
“I was a matron for the Chicago Park District beaches, and ‘matron’ is just a fancy word for ‘I cleaned the bathrooms,’” laughs Dr. Julie Pedersen, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC).
Cleaning only took her about an hour, so she had the rest of her eight-hour shifts to enjoy those summer months in the early 1970s before heading to college while reading classics from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, and Hermann Hesse.
It was during this time that she would form her love of world literature and establish what would become a passion for the great novelists, and later, philosophers – all laying the foundation for her role as an educator today.
“That’s where I got my best education, and I just found that books transported me into a different world,” Dr. Pedersen says. “If I hadn’t found compelling books with ideas mirroring the kinds of ideas and things I thought about, I don’t know where I would have been.”
All in on Philosophy
Dr. Pedersen’s beachfront education led her to become the first person in her extended family to both move out and go to college. With a laundry basket full of clothes and $100 stuffed in an envelope from her mother, she was off to attend Loyola University Chicago to study biology. However, it didn’t take her long to discover her passion for philosophy.
“At the end of my second year, I took my first philosophy class and after the first class, I went down to the registrar’s office and doubled my major,” Dr. Pedersen explains. “I just totally fell in love with philosophy.”
She received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Loyola, and when her husband was offered a job in West Lafayette, Indiana, Dr. Pedersen took the opportunity to pursue graduate school. A few weeks after moving, she started classes with an 11-month-old baby on her hip.
A few years later she moved back to Chicago with a master’s degree and doctorate in philosophy from Purdue University.
Breakthroughs in a Brave New World
Although Dr. Pedersen attended college in person, she relates to her students who share the experience of pursuing their degrees while raising a family. The flexibility online learning offers, though, is why Dr. Pedersen has been teaching with UAGC for 15 years.
“When I first ventured into online teaching, I was skeptical,” she admits, “but I found that I was able to teach, and the students were able to learn in this brave new world.”
One of her favorite assignments she created is a discussion board that prompts students to record themselves reading from a philosopher’s original text.
“I knew I wanted to do this because it does so much learning right away in the first week, but I had no idea how much students would love it,” said Dr. Pedersen.
It also became a favorite of the faculty.
“It’s so great for instructors, too, because they get to see students in all the places where they really are – a man in his garage late at night and a woman in her office cubicle, both reading Aristotle,” said Pedersen. “That’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
One of the works she included in this assignment was excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Dr. Pedersen described the instructional and emotional impact of online students reading those excerpts.
“I have had some instructors say, ‘I literally had tears in my eyes,’ because it breaks through so much that otherwise isolates us in the online environment,” she said.
Realities of the Windy City
What Dr. Pedersen teaches in her online classes stems from not only her philosophy degrees and high school beach reading but also her lived experiences.
Dr. Pedersen grew up on a Chicago block in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of political turbulence, riots, and racial violence.
“There were riots in Chicago when Martin Luther King came to march in solidarity, so I knew a lot about Dr. King and racial tension, and it was such a defining moment for Chicago and the protests leading up to it,” said Dr. Pedersen.
She described Chicago’s Grant Park and its landmark Buckingham Fountain – one of the largest fountains in the world – teeming with thousands of protestors and recalls seeing images on her television of policemen in their riot gear wielding their batons.
“I wanted to take the 22 Clark Street Bus down and see it for myself, but 10-year-olds were grounded,” said Dr. Pedersen. “We had to be inside as soon as 6 o’clock, and we were told not to even sit by windows because bullets might come in, so it was just part of the environment of my life.”
Her father was a police officer, and during the 1940s and 1950s, his mother and her sister were among the first female election precinct captains in Chicago, so Dr. Pedersen was raised in a politically active household.
Dr. Pedersen’s childhood bedroom was next to the long-corded landline phone in their house, and she recalls waking up to it ringing at 3:30 a.m. in June 1968 and her mother answering with shock.
“I remember my mom holding the phone and calling out to my father, ‘They’ve just killed Bobby Kennedy,’’ Dr. Pedersen thinks back. “That’s how personal politics was in our home.”
Two months later, the memorable 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago. Dr. Pedersen remembers watching her father and other police officers pile on their gear in 12-hour shifts to respond to the anti-Vietnam War protests and how politically aware she became of the world at that age.
A Self-Made Wordsmith
Although still politically engaged, Dr. Pedersen has developed passions of her own in adulthood to which she also lends her free time. She attends music improv classes at Second City and writes screenplays, which she taught herself how to do by, of course, diving into books.
The same Dr. Pedersen who spent hours on Chicago beaches as a teenager transporting herself to worlds created by novelists sat in a Borders bookstore as an adult immersing herself in a library of screenplay writing.
“I always wanted to write movies, and I learned how to do it – self-taught,” said Dr. Pedersen. “I spent time in Borders reading all their screenplay books, just sitting right there reading them for free.”
Her self-made education has awarded her a few accolades in the film competition circle. Pedersen was a finalist in the Austin Film Festival which awarded her a spot at a lunch where Oliver Stone was the keynote speaker. She also placed as a quarter-finalist (top 350 out of 7,000) twice in the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has received other awards and honors, including one that gave her screenplay about gun violence on the streets of Chicago the opportunity to be read aloud by director John McNaughton.
“All my screenplays focus on ethical issues, and it’s just something I love to do,” said Dr. Pedersen. “That was the most fun thing ever to have my kids next to me, in their thirties, and listening to mom’s screenplay be read.”
Limitless Passion for Learning
Before writing successful screenplays, Dr. Pedersen first picked up the pen to pursue journalism on the side after graduating from Loyola. She just had her first baby – whom she named after a philosopher – and wanted to take some time to raise her family.
“I wanted nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom, so I spent five-to-six years fulfilling that amazing trip beyond all trips,” said Dr. Pedersen. “I had two sons, and that’s when I started journalism because that was easy to do on my own time, but I never lost my love for philosophy.”
She picked up journalism again after earning her master’s degree and doctorate and began writing feature stories for the Chicago Tribune Sunday edition.
Her first story was an on-site visit to a fire department in a Chicago suburb to write about the subculture of firehouse cooks. It was a workday spent surrounded by firemen sharing lasagna truffles and peanut butter silk pie with her while describing their passion for cooking. The feature story she wrote was a hit, and she was sent out to cover a few more culinary firemen cooking for their crews in the area.
Dr. Pederson fell in love with the journalistic process.
“It is just so interesting to go into places and do human-interest stories and learn,” said Dr. Pedersen. “I learned so much about so many different things.”
She has since applied her real-world writing experience to opportunities at UAGC, including serving on the editorial board for The UAGC Chronicle and being the founder and editor-in-chief for the UAGC Humanities Review as well as two newsletters.
Between teaching, mentoring students, being on an editorial board, hobbies, and family time, you would think Dr. Pedersen’s plate was full. Still, her enthusiasm for learning leaves room for discussions about the future of education and books with her fellow faculty at UAGC.
“It’s such a great camaraderie, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” said Dr. Pedersen.
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Written by Felysha Walker, UAGC Content Coordinator.