Matais Pouncil

Ed.D. in Educational Administration & Leadership, 2009
School of Education

August 1, 2008

Matais Pouncil Works to Promote Educational Opportunities, Multicultural Diversity, and Prejudice Reduction in Educational and Community Settings

Matais Pouncil earned a B.S. from Southern University, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a M.Ed. from California State University, Long Beach. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in the CSU/UCI Joint Ed.D. in Educational Administration and Leadership. He defended his dissertation proposal and advanced to candidacy in February 2007 and will be defending his dissertation this Fall.

For his doctoral study path, Matais chose the CSULB emphasis in Higher Education and Community College Leadership. His dissertation research is entitled Acting Black: Black Men and Doctoral Degree Completion. Matais has been conducting a qualitative study involving 15 participants that looked at factors that contribute to degree completion and academic achievement for black men in doctoral programs. The research questions driving his study are:

  1. What is the ontological framework that informed the stories of black men who persisted to doctoral degree completion?
  2. What were the perceived institutional supports and institutional barriers experienced during the doctoral degree process?
  3. How do black men describe intrapersonal supports and barriers, and the influences of personal non-cognitive factors, experienced during the process of doctoral degree completion?

Matais entered the CSU/UCI doctoral program with employment and volunteer experience in the area he wished to study. He has worked with Title IV and Title V programs for over ten years. He has worked for a Talent Search program, two Upward Bound programs, and an Educational Opportunity Program. He currently is the Director of the Extended Opportunity Program & Services (EOPS) at Foothill College in Los Altos, California. As a Diversity Consultant with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, Matais has provided anti-bias, prejudice reduction, and human relations training for high schools, colleges and universities, and government agencies. As a lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, he taught Masters students multicultural educational practices to employ in their classrooms and lives.

In addition, and only somewhat related to his writing and work in education, Matais Pouncil is the former owner of Matais Books, Cards & Art in Long Beach, California, the only niche bookstore of its kind in the country. He is the author of a self-published, chapbook of poetry entitled Notes of a Momma’s Boy: Selected Poems by Matais Pouncil and a contributor to the recently published anthology If We Have To Take Tomorrow, edited by Marvin K. White and Frank Leon Roberts. Matais lives in Oakland, California.

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