About Dr. Mossberg

Teacher, thespian, poet, environmentalist, lecturer, scholar-Dr. Barbara Mossberg is a living example of integrated studies and the potential for interdisciplinarity. Or, as she describes it, living purple.

“Purple is the color of Integrated Studies.” says Barbara (or “Dr. B,” as her students call her), who directs the IS program at CSUMB. “Just as red and blue make purple, purple represents the creativity which is forged through the fusion of arts and sciences and the disciplines that make up our students’ academic dream plans. “

One example of Barbara’s purple lifestyle is her scholarship on the life of Sierra Club founder John Muir. In numerous articles, public presentations, and an upcoming book, Barbara examines how Muir, a geologist, used language arts to influence environmental public policy. “I have a particular interest in how humanities and arts express and shape values and ideas about our environment which become public policy and legislation.” Taking fusion one step further, Barbara is tying this research in to a theatrical production: “I’m writing a musical which interweaves how the ways artists and writers have portrayed trees intersect with politics and public policy.” Though at first that may seem like a stretch, Barbara’s puts in simply: “Drama is a way to bring all the different disciplines together.”

Drama has been a lifelong interest for Barbara. As a young girl, she wrote and performed plays in her neighborhood. “I invited the neighbors to my little shoebox theatre and then the front yard Little Theater and sold lemonade and cookies.”

For the past 30 years she has been performing a series of her own one-women plays based on Emily Dickinson, the subject of Barbara’s award-winning book and much of her scholarship and international lecturing. Another recent theater credit includes a starring role as Lettice in the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts production of Lettice and Lovage.

“This play is a tribute to education and to educators,” says Barbara. “Lettice takes it upon herself to educate everyone…she is a helpless educator. She cannot help using every moment as an opportunity to excite passion for what there is to know. She makes each moment a teaching moment.”

Perhaps Lettice isn’t so far from Barbara herself. She began her academic career teaching drama and literature at the University of Oregon. Later, Barbara’s teaching career expanded to include an international appointment as senior Fulbright distinguished lecturer at the University of Helsinki where she continued teaching American literature and drama as bicentennial chair of American studies.

Over the course of her career she won teaching awards from every university she’s been associated with up to now (including several more Fulbrights) and served as president of Goddard College, a title she retains as Emerita.

The U.S. State Department recognized her educational leadership and appointed her U.S. Scholar in Residence to represent American higher education in the U.S. and around the world. She’s lectured and consulted for countless educational, governmental, and nonprofit organizations, proving that she’s willing to take on almost any subject in any setting and make it a teachable moment. After all, it just deepens her purple hue.

Barbara’s leadership role promoting ideas about an integrated education “for the whole person, the whole life, the whole world” led to her serving as senior fellow for the American Council on Education for college and university leaders, including for the Center for Institutional and International Initiatives, and the Office of Women.

Her educational vision of “treating with reverence each other and the earth” drew her immediately to CSUMB’s Vision, and once on campus, she was drawn “like a moth to a flame” to the Integrated Studies program. Based on her educational philosophy and values, she seeks to empower both students and faculty to embrace their various interests and curiosities and synthesize those ideas into meaningful educational plans.

“The students burst into my office with an ambitious agenda fueled by their own conscience and idealism and practical goals for how to make a difference in their world. I ask them, what experiences, abilities, skills, and knowledge do you need to play this role? We consider our whole CSUMB curriculum, faculty, and programs as the canvas on which to draw. We are a team that fosters the ability to be purple, so that they can be the full, whole, complex, coherent learners they are and that our society so needs.

“The Integrated Studies program,” Barbara says, “”is the “don’t settle zone. If a student is interested in art, digital design, marine mammal education, Japanese, and scuba, and wants to work on international aquarium-based public environmental education, this major says, ‘you are not Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters, trying to cut off your toes and heels from a perfectly splendid foot to fit a little glass slipper of some prince single major. We have a program which accommodates your complexity.'” She adds, “For me, part of the pleasure is working with our interdisciplinary faculty, who make my purple mind feel so at home.”

Barbara’s scholarly and lecture projects include works in progres on integral education of “ancient wisdom and emergent knowledge,” the role of classics in multicultural education, American cultural studies, integral leadership, and her own poetry and photography. She gives poetry readings, and lectures locally and nationally in theaters and educational centers and Yosemite National Park (a recent environmental-rousing talk was in a barn with horses looking on!), including keynoting Phi Beta Kappa.

Wanting to support both arts and environmental education, Barbara is on many local community boards, including serving as president of the Forest Theater Guild, and is devoted to Restore Hetch Hetchy.

“My life is definitely purple. I tell my mother, who worries at how busy I am, it’s a beautiful life, because I love all the colors that make it up, every part of what I am doing.”

15 thoughts on “About Dr. Mossberg

  1. Hello Barbara,

    I was at the CCW club last night and heard your talk. It energized me. I want to finish the book I’m writing regarding Dutch teenagers growing up during WWII and their resistance activities. It also involves their experience trying to find food during the ‘hunger winter’. I’m also a news reporter for South County Newspapers.

    Thank you for your wonderful talk.

    Laureen

  2. Dear Barbara,

    Glorious autumn days in PG. I love the way the bay stirs just after sunrise, as if the light starts a bay heartbeat. Was sorry I had to miss last week’s class.

    I thought you and your readers might be interested in this unique multi-media science meets art experiment. Moving…
    http://www.spectordance.org/performances/ocean.html

    oceanic gratitude,
    Elayne

  3. Dr. Rossberg:

    I am so confirmed!

    You are so much more than I have been told!

    Thank you for giving me an appreciation for life. You have given words such permission-al meaning for me during your beautiful presentation last night at Chataqua Hall in Pacific Grove, (where you have been the most splendid of all Poets-In-Residence on planet Earth! Here for the Present. (?) Title of your next publication?

    I hope we can find a way to send your “Conclusion” to President Obama. It would be so amazingly meaningful for him, I feel certain because it is, and you are, to me and oh so many others.

    The best is yet to come!
    Love,
    Katie Shain

  4. Ms. Mossberg,
    I took your American Literature class from the U of Oregon in 1981-82-ish. I hated literature and needed an “arts and letters” class. Someone in Mac Court — the old days of running from table to table to register for classes — suggested your class, nay she suggested you. Your class was life changing!

    I learned to love literature, especially our great American Literature of the 19th century. A very rich time, indeed! Up until that time, the longest book I read was probably just over 110 pages. Then I saw, gulp, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Oh, too much I thought. But it wasn’t too much because you showed me how to explore the minds of the characters and the author. Not only that, but my mind as well.

    Thank you so very much.

    BTW, In the lecture portion of the grade, I earned an “A”, but the TA of the discussion group gave me (yes I earned, she gave :-)) a “C” for an overall “B” for the class. I always felt cheated because the TA lacked any real ability to impose knowledge let alone inspiration. I remember that most of the discussion group would look in bewilderment as we listened to the TA import an anachronistic framework in which to decode 19th poetry while we missed the beauty intended by the author. We were robbed!

    Then again, you became the Gold Standard and perhaps that is a very high standard indeed. You were one of two or three of all my instructors at three universities that truly had the gift to inspire. I think I overpaid for all the other classes.

    Thanks again,

    Steve Ingham
    BS Math and Psychology, Summer 1983

  5. Dear Barbara, old friend,

    This tiding has been on its way for nearly three decades now, is it? A heartfelt welcome — as the spirit moves you — to join this spirited circle of the Center for American Studies Advanced Degree Offering in the Spiritual Sciences (Common Sense) with either an advanced degree offering or as a valued advisor… ever more.

    With warm greetings,

    Con-cord-e,

    Stuart

    Stuart-Sinclair

  6. Dear Barbara, old friend,

    This tiding has been on its way for nearly three decades now, is it? A heartfelt welcome — as the spirit moves you — to join this spirited circle of the Center for American Studies Advanced Degree Offering in the Spiritual Sciences (Common Sense) with either an advanced degree offering or as a valued advisor… ever more.

    With warm greetings,

    Con-cord-e,

    Stuart-Sinclair

  7. Dear Barbara: I am so impressed with you and your kind confident upbeat nature. It is my pleasure to know you.

  8. Some years ago, maybe 3?, in Boise, at the ASLE meeting, you gave me a copy of your Sometimes the Woman in the Mirror Is Not You, on the condition that I would read it. Well, I am still reading it, with pleasure & amusement. Thank you!

  9. Hi Barbara,

    Ii was very kind of you to watch the video of “Emily Sings” at EDIS this year. I’ve sent you several emails (to different addresses) about The Dickinson Ensemble, but I don’t think any of them have reached you. If you see this could you contact me, either by email or phone, so that I can update you on a proposed budget for perofmring at EDIS next year?

    Thank you,

    Don
    708 524-8605

    • Dear Don,

      Thank you for finding me. I will find out what I can about the Possibilities of your wonderful music for EDIS!

      I am never on LinkedIn so it was a kind of cosmic force that connected us like this!

      Sincerely,
      Barbara

  10. Hi Dr. B!

    I was lucky enough to be a student of yours at U of O, my friend Emily and I attended your Revolutionary Imagination study abroad program during the summer of 2016.

    We are hoping to see if you might still have the journals that we wrote in each day. We would love to pick those journals up and add them to our collection of prized possessions!

    I hope you’re well! We talk of this trip so often, it truly has had a lasting impact.

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