Joella Gipson
Joella Gipson | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 8, 1929 California, Los Angeles |
| Died | January 31, 2012 (aged 83) Windsor, California |
| Occupation | Professor at Wayne State University in 1972 |
| Known for | She was an American musician, mathematician, and educator who became the first African American student at Mount St. Mary's College |
| Notable work | Consumer and Career Mathematics, Black Mathematicians and their Works, Impetus (1978), the Black Woman: Proceedings of the Fourth National Congress of Black Women of Canada (1978), and Changing Faces of Romania (2000). |
| Spouse(s) | Theodore Horace Gipson who died in Los Angeles in 1972. Then she remarried to William Lawrence Simpson, in 1980 who then died in 2005 |
| Awards | Outstanding alumna of the year for 1990 And In 1993, she won the Wayne State University Alumni Faculty Service Award |
Joella Hardeman Gipson-Simpson (January 8, 1929 – January 31, 2012) was an American musician, mathematician, and educator who became the first African American student at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.[1][2]
Early life and music education
[edit]Joella Hardeman was born in Los Angeles on January 8, 1929, and began studying music at age eight. After graduating from Saint Agnes High School,[1] a Catholic school in Los Angeles that operated from 1919 to 1953,[3] she entered Mount St. Mary's College, becoming the first African American student accepted there.[1] She majored in music performance and minored in English and philosophy, graduating in 1950,[1][2] and won a graduate scholarship to the State University of Iowa, where she earned a master's degree in music education in 1951.[1]
With this, she began a career in music education, teaching at a number of institutions, including Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,[1] where she was listed in 1955 as a faculty sponsor for the local chapter of the Music Educators National Conference.[4] At Southern University, she met Theodore Horace Gipson, who became her husband and the father of her daughter.
Later life and mathematics education
[edit]Joella Gipson and her husband moved back to Los Angeles,[1] and Joella Gipson became a teacher and supervisor for the Los Angeles Unified School District.[1][5] It was in this part of her life that her interests shifted to mathematics, and she became certified as a mathematics teacher,[1] regularly attending National Science Foundation sponsored mathematics institutes from 1958 to 1969.[5] Her husband Theodore Gipson died in Los Angeles in 1972.[1]
In 1971, Gipson earned a doctorate in mathematics education from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[5][6] with the dissertation Teaching probability in the elementary school: an exploratory study, supervised by John A. Easley Jr. Her dissertation also cites the mentorship of Max Beberman, who died before it could be completed.[6] After completing her doctorate, she became an associate professor at Wayne State University in 1972, and was promoted to full professor in 1978.[7] She served as a Fulbright Scholar in Belize in 1994,[8] and again in Romania in 1998.[7] At Wayne State, she also directed the master's program in teaching, the Women, Minorities, and Handicapped Program in Education, and a mathematics education institute, and chaired a commission on the status of women at the university.[5]
Gipson married her second husband, William Lawrence Simpson, in 1980.[1] While teaching at Wayne State, she lived across the nearby Canadian border in Windsor, Ontario. Her husband died in 2005,[1] and she retired as a professor emerita after 35 years of service at Wayne State in 2007.[7] She died in Windsor on January 31, 2012.[1]
Books
[edit]Gipson was the coauthor of Consumer and Career Mathematics (with L. Carey Bolster and H. Douglas Woodburn, Scott & Foresman, 1978)[9] and Black Mathematicians and Their Works (with Virginia Newell, L. Waldo Rich, and Beauregard Stubblefield, Dorrance & Company, 1980).[10] She also edited Impetus, the Black Woman: Proceedings of the Fourth National Congress of Black Women of Canada (1978), and self-published Changing Faces of Romania (2000).
Recognition
[edit]Mount St. Mary's College named Gipson their outstanding alumna of the year for 1990.[2][5] In 1993, she won the Wayne State University Alumni Faculty Service Award "for her outstanding work on behalf of women, minorities, and the disabled in educational leadership programs".[11] In 2010, the Wayne State University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies gave her their lifetime achievement award.[12]
A scholarship at Wayne State University, the Joella Gipson Endowed Scholarship for Peace and Human Rights Education, is named for her.[13]
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m "Dr. Joella H. Gipson-Simpson", The Windsor Star, February 10, 2012 – via Legacy.com
- ^ a b c McCargar, Vicky (September 12, 2013), "Remembering Joella", The Mount Archives blog: History blog of the Mount Saint Mary's University community, Mount St. Mary's University, retrieved 2021-09-26 – via Blogspot
- ^ "School history", St. Agnes Catholic School, retrieved 2021-09-26
- ^ "Collegiate Newsletter", Music Educators Journal, 42 (1): 49–52, September–October 1955, doi:10.2307/3388070, JSTOR 3388070, S2CID 221045550
- ^ a b c d e Maitrepierre, Marie Van Blaricom (Fall 1990), "Music, Mathematics, and Spheres of Influence", MSMC Magazine, Mount St. Mary's College, retrieved 2021-09-26
- ^ a b Gipson, Joella Hardeman (1971), Teaching probability in the elementary school: an exploratory study (Doctoral thesis), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, hdl:2142/76784, OCLC 3803574, ProQuest 302606249
- ^ a b c "Joella Gipson-Simpson" (PDF), Faculty/Staff Highlights (2006–2007), The Educator, Wayne State College of Education, p. 6, January 2008, retrieved 2021-09-26
- ^ "Joella Gipson", Fulbright Scholar Directory, Fulbright Scholar Program, US Department of State, retrieved 2021-09-26
- ^ Review of Consumer and Career Mathematics:
- ^ Reviews of Black Mathematicians and their Works:
- Goins, Edray (February 2021), "Mathematical comfort food", The American Mathematical Monthly, 128 (2): 188, doi:10.1080/00029890.2021.1853445
- Kenschaft, Patricia Clark (1997), "What next? A meta-history of black mathematicians", African Americans in mathematics: Proceedings of the second conference for African-American researchers in the mathematical sciences held at DIMACS, Piscataway, NJ, USA, June 26–28, 1996, Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, pp. 183–186, ISBN 0-8218-0678-5, Zbl 1155.01347; review, p. 185
- Sims, Janet L. (Summer 1981), The Journal of Negro History, 66 (2): 160–161, doi:10.2307/2717293, JSTOR 2717293
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link) - Sonnabend, Tom (November 1980), The Mathematics Teacher, 73 (8): 629, JSTOR 27962208
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link) - Zaslavsky, Claudia (February 1983), Historia Mathematica, 10 (1): 105–115, doi:10.1016/0315-0860(83)90049-6
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
- ^ "Rotarian honors", The Rotarian, pp. 52–53, December 1993
- ^ "Former president of Ireland and international peace activist Mary Robinson to speak at Wayne State University, April 22: Will be among award recipients at program later that day", Today@Wayne, Wayne State University, March 30, 2010, retrieved 2021-09-26
- ^ "Joella Gipson Endowed Scholarship for Peace and Human Rights Education", Our Current and Recent Supporters and Sponsors, Wayne State University, archived from the original on 2016-08-05, retrieved 2021-09-26
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
- 1929 births
- 2012 deaths
- American music educators
- American women music educators
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- African-American mathematicians
- Mount St. Mary's University (Los Angeles) alumni
- University of Iowa alumni
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni
- Southern University faculty
- Wayne State University faculty
- American emigrants to Canada
- 20th-century African-American people
- 20th-century African-American women
- 20th-century American women mathematicians
- 21st-century American women mathematicians