Diana Watson-Phillips and Sarah McCall

Sarah (S) talks about the social issues she cares about: racial and gender equity. S says she is a writer and believes very strongly in the power of telling your own story.

D details her career in education. She says when it comes to education, she is passionate about looking at the whole child, including their parents, their home lives, etc. D says it is very important to work with parents. She says one of the very first things she did when she taught pre-school was to apply for a grant to bring parents in and provide them with training. S says she struggled connecting with parents when she taught high school.

D talks about her faith. She says she grew up going to different churches with her great grandmother and grandmother.

D explains what brought her to Virginia. She says her husband passed in 2014 and she later decided to make the move to Virginia to be closer to a friend.

D shares her life story. She says she was raised by her grandparents in Barbados and migrated to the United States in 1996. D says she is twice married, she divorced once and her second husband passed. D says in the United States she became interested in learning about children. She says she taught preschool for four years and later worked as an education specialist and adjunct professor. D says she is currently with a Methodist church.

S shares her life story. She says she was raised in a big Catholic family and grew up understanding the value of working hard and being a part of something. S says she did not relate to some of the black-and-white thinking in the Catholic church. She shares that her father died unexpectedly when she was fourteen. S says her parents were not college educated but she went to college and studied English. S adds that she worked in the restaurant industry until her early thirties when she got sober, transitioned to teaching, and got married.

D says there were not a lot of books in her community growing up but she did have the bible and would read that often. She says as an educator, she tries to encourage parents to read with their children. D says in her fist preschool classroom, she got library cards for all the children in her classroom.

D and S share why they wanted to participate in a One Small Step interview.

D and S discuss their commonalities.

S says though she broke away from the Catholic church, when she underwent big, scary changes in her early thirties, she realized she had a lot of faith and rediscovered spiritual practices.