When Pacific Oaks reporting fellow Deepa Fernandes, M.A., discusses how her five-year exploration into segregation in preschools began, a common thread in her storied journalism career emerges—simply wanting to understand.
“I noticed when I was looking for a preschool for my own children that each classroom looked the same. Whether it was a classroom full of brown kids, white kids, or black kids—the children were notably almost all the same race and ethnicity,” says Fernandes. “So I started asking everyone—parents, teachers, policy makers—anyone I could find. I wanted to know why it was like this.”
She often allows such personal experiences to bleed into her career—a career devoted to telling the stories of communities that are often ignored and locked out of traditional media.
Her career as a journalist has taken her around the world, reporting from a dozen countries—her home in Australia, to Latin America, to New York City, and eventually to California, where she currently is the 2019-2020 Pacific Oaks College early childhood reporting fellow. Pacific Oaks received a two-year grant from Los Angeles County Children and Families First—Proposition 10 Commission, or as we know it: First 5 LA, to establish a journalism fellowship that would produce stories about early care and education in order to help inform legislative leaders, policy makers, and practitioners on issues related to children.
Fernandes was chosen for the fellowship because of the important work she was already doing in the early childhood education field, focusing on a wide range of issues and implications for policy and practices related to children from prenatal to age 5, their families, and communities. With the fellowship, Fernandes has used the opportunity Pacific Oaks and First 5 LA have provided her to dig into the stories that truly empower people. She has written about public schools 65 years after desegregation, as well as stories about the new law allowing child care providers to unionize and an in-depth series on early childhood poverty in California.
An award-winning journalist, Fernandes has been a freelance writer for the BBC and Pasadena’s NPR syndicate KPCC. She won a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy Award for her television investigative reporting for PBS-member station KCET, and the LA Press Club named her Radio Reporter of the Year for the past three years. She also was a Knight Journalism fellow at Stanford University and has a master’s degree from Columbia University.
In a conversation about her work, Fernandes discussed one of her first assignments, which opened her eyes to the power that unique stories could have. In a feature about arranged marriages in Indian culture, she interviewed her aunties and other family members. The story was very straightforward to her, but the responses of others were a surprise. “Many people said they didn’t know that Indians laughed so much. I was confused because why would you think that Indians don’t laugh?” Fernandes says.
“But it led me to the realization that in telling one little story, many aspects can translate to all of these other marginalized communities’ stories that are often overlooked,” she says.
“I want my journalism to make a difference—to break down the barriers that often exist in traditional media,” Fernandes explains. “No matter the story, I try to look at the community solutions available—not just the solutions that people who have never experienced these problems suggest. I want to listen to the mothers, the teachers, the community members, those who see the problem every day and who know how we can fix it.”
Pacific Oaks was founded with the mission to give a voice to diverse members of the community who are often spoken over. By supporting Fernandes’ work, the legacy of inclusion at Pacific Oaks College continues.
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