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He has taught hundreds of educators in three decades at 51�Թ�, but Distinguished University Professor of Education Mark Bailey still relishes the role of the student.

“I’m continually learning. I am a learner first and a teacher second,” Bailey said. “I wanted to be at a place where the students I worked with could have an example of the theories I was talking about and see them in practice.”

Bailey will continue to be a learner even as he retires this spring after 30 years at Pacific and 48 years as an educator. In fact, it will be the first time in 67 years that he hasn’t spent most of his year in a classroom.

“In 1958, I started at the Stanford Laboratory Preschool in the Bay Area. Since that time, there has not been a year when I haven’t either been a student or a teacher, or sometimes both, in my life,” he said.

It was a thirst to learn that led Bailey to pursue a career educating teachers. After graduating from college with a teaching license and spending a year as a substitute teacher, he began working as a preschool and kindergarten teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Bailey found himself fascinated by the curiosity of his students, which included families of University of Colorado faculty and staff. 

The questions the children asked inspired Bailey’s lifelong pursuit of experiential learning and developing curriculum that allows students to learn by doing. Those same students also exposed Bailey to who he really wanted to be as an educator.

“I began to encounter challenges with students that I couldn’t address, that I wasn’t prepared to handle, that I didn’t have the background to handle,” he said. “I decided that I needed to go back to school because I didn’t know what I needed to understand to be effective.”

That desire to learn led Bailey to the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his PhD in educational psychology in 1994, and eventually to Pacific, but not before the opportunity to develop his own classroom, an underlying inspiration for Pacific’s Early Learning Community.

“The person who owned that preschool (in Colorado) had a building next door that was unused,” Bailey said. “I proposed that I could develop that into a kindergarten. She said, ‘Go for it.’ So I created kindergarten classroom and curriculum utilizing experiential learning.”

Bailey came to Pacific in 1995 specifically to help develop a Master of Arts in Teaching program for early childhood education. The memory of that Colorado classroom, and the desire to create experiential learning experiences for students of all ages, never faded. Twelve years later, Bailey’s dream of such a school at Pacific was realized with the opening of the Early Learning Community (ELC).

A demonstration school for preschool through fourth-grade children, the ELC not only provides small classroom environments with curriculum designed for hands-on learning, but it also provides Pacific students the opportunity to put theory to practice.
 

The ELC’s development and its growth continue to be among Bailey’s proudest achievements.

“Pacific has supported this kind of dream, this vision I had many years ago,” Bailey said. “When I was able to get the grant and start the ELC, there were people who trusted me and trusted Pacific to try this new school and new place to learn. Now we don’t have enough room for all of the children who are interested and all of the parents who would like to bring their kids here.”

What the ELC provides, and Bailey has tried to model in his classes, is the value that learning face-to-face, person-to-person provides. He experienced it firsthand in graduate school where he taught correspondence courses. The experience of education during the COVID-19 pandemic only confirmed that conviction.

Distance learning and Zoom have their place and value, Bailey believes, but can’t replace the in-person experience.

 

“In a lesson I was at today, students were reading out loud to each other. You can read silently, but reading out loud is just the next step up,” Bailey said. “They’re saying, ‘Ooh, are you sure it’s pronounced that way? I pronounce it this way.’ That navigation and negotiation is really human and allows us to learn with and from each other instead of in our own bubble. And that’s really powerful.

“The way in which we learn is so much more robust, so much more powerful, and fosters deeper understanding when you experience it in a multi-dimensional way than if you just read about it or talk about it or are passively taught about it in a classroom.”

Bailey readily admits that he won’t be able to stay away from Pacific in retirement. He plans to teach a class next spring and will continue to be involved with the ELC. He is particularly looking forward to serving as the bus driver for the school’s field trips and working to maintain the Brim Family Outdoor Learning Center, the ELC’s outdoor classroom.

“I live four blocks away, so I walk through campus multiple times a week,” he said. “So I think that the connection will remain. I really value Pacific as a place where there is openness to support projects and possibilities and encourage innovation.”

The list of awards Bailey has received is extensive, including several fellowships and being named a Distinguished University Professor in 2013. The Forest Grove News-Times provided some public recognition in 2024, naming Bailey as an “Amazing Educator.”

But for all of the awards, the biggest reward for Bailey has been seeing his students of all ages discover a passion for learning. That passion comes full circle this spring as a student from the ELC’s first cohort, Skyler Sanchez ’25, will earn her degree from Pacific, a long-time dream for Bailey. Appropriately enough, Sanchez’s degree is in education.

“I’ve been supervising her student teaching and she’s amazing,” Bailey said. “I thought that I would like to stay here until the first student who leaves the ELC comes back and graduates from Pacific. Little did I know that it would be within the area of education. Watching this process through her eyes has been spectacular.”