Reflection Essay on Teaching, Scholarly Work, and Service

If my first two years at SUNY Cortland could be described as "driving in the dark and I could not see too far ahead," my continued reappointments allowed me more time in the last two years to reflect and improve on teaching, scholarly work, and service and to set up long-term goals to be an accomplished teacher-scholar and an active member in the local community. My experience continues to be exciting, rewarding, and successful when my goal has changed from surviving to thriving.

My Cortland experience has been exciting because I always enjoy new challenges. New challenges take the forms of new courses, new course assignments, new assessment rubrics, new scholarly work, and new responsibilities of my service in the community. First, new courses provide me great opportunities to read and think more about course materials. I had developed five new courses since 2005: EDU375, EDU378, EDU480, EDU524 and EDU640. The first three are undergraduate courses in the major of Childhood Education program. The other two courses are graduate courses in the master's program of education. I have also developed EDU647, which is a new prep for spring 2008, but did not get to teach it due to last-minute rescheduling of courses in the department. I have developed the independent study of EDU640 for three graduate students. New preparation takes time, but I prefer teaching new courses, which provide me with the incentives to read more in the field of social studies and teacher education. Reading inspires me to come up with innovative ideas for better and effective instruction. For new courses, I designed new course assignments to provide opportunities for students to experience hands-on, minds-on, and hearts-on learning activities. More description will be available in the teaching section of this portfolio. Reviewing students' assignments and their comments on CTEs, I reflected on students' constructive suggestions to clarify assignment instructions and improve on grading rubrics.

Please click here or Teaching on the left-hand side for further reflections and evidence that support my reflections.

Second, my scholarly work, represented by five peer-reviewed journal article publications and seventeen presentations at all levels in the past four years, has met and exceed the standard requirements for continuing appointment AND promotion from assistant professor to associate professor.

My scholarly work through collaboration with colleagues and scholars from the campus and around the world are very exciting. The scholarly work I have been doing fuel my determination to remain a rigorous scholar in the field of social studies and global education. My scholary work taught me that sensibilities such as love, engaging with intellectual work, the hope of changing students' lives, a belief in the democratic potential of public education, and anger at the conditions of public education are all at the heart of what makes for excellent and caring teachers and scholars. More description will be available in the scholarly work section of this portfolio.

Here I will describe two projects as examples of my scholarly work. One of the projects I was working on during the spring of 2009 is the study entitled "LESS is more." The study was first supported by the Faculty Research Grant and then sponsored by the Drescher Leave Award, which was awarded to me in spring 2009. LESS stands for a program of Literature-based Elementary Social Studies. The purpose of the study is to test the effectiveness of reading children's literature with social studies themes on students' reading comprehension. I collaborated with local school teachers in their classrooms and hope to expand the study to other schools for external grants.

The other example I would like to share is a study I led on a history textbook analysis on the Korean War. With scholars from the United States, North Korea, South Korea, and researchers from University of Indiana at Kokomo and Georgia State University, who were originally from Japan and China, I conducted the study to compare textbook presentations of the Korean War in different countries. Our study was presented at the National Council for the Social Studies' Annual Conference in 2006. The manuscript was accepted by the Social Studies, a peer-reviewed journal, and will be published in its September/October 2009 issue this year. The editor of the Social Studies commented that our paper has been the best on the topic of the Korean War and textbook analysis over the years. I led my international team of scholars to work on a "consumer" version of our paper so that classroom teachers in middle schools can use our lesson plans to teach about the past and present of the Korean situation in today's international arena. That paper was peer-reviewed by editors of Social Studies Practice and Research and will be published in its Fall/Winter issue of 2009.

Compared to teaching, my scholarly activities could have been more successful if I had had more time for them. It would be very hard for me to keep my passion and enthusiasm for teaching if I were not involved in scholarly activities. Research provides me with intrinsic motivation in my academic life. I understand that faculty scholarly activities involve passion, originality, creativity, collaboration, a thorough grounding in previous scholarship, and effective communication of contributions through teaching, presentations, and publications.

My research interests lie in the general areas of social studies curriculum and instruction, elementary teacher education, and comparative and international education. I would like to reflect on my progress and goals in five scholarly areas:

1. Assisting international students to adjust in the U.S. academic community,
2. Integrating teaching and research in elementary social studies method courses,
3. Conducting a cross-cultural survey study on global awareness education,
4. Evaluating the effectiveness of course assignments in the elementary teacher education program at Cortland through an interview study.
5. Developing the Literature-based Elementary Social Studies (LESS) Program and examining the LESS' program's effects on reading comprehension of elementary students.

Please click here or Scholarly Work on the left-hand side for further reflections and evidence that support my reflections.

Third, I have been involved in service at all levels. Service has been an important part of establishing myself as a faculty member at Cortland. An essential component of social studies is civic participation. If I encourage my students to participate in volunteer activities that are important to the community, I certainly see service as a way of both enhancing one's learning and developing a sense of civic pride and values.

At the national level, I was elected Member-at-Large in 2007's Annual Conference of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and was appointed the project coordinator for Adopt-A-School Project, hosted by the International Assembly(IA), an umbrella organization under the NCSS. As the coordinator, I collaborate among other colleagues to make orders of backpacks to be sent to students in a school in Malawei, Africa. I have always been serving as presentation chairs, reviewers of proposals at different academic and professional organizations. I have been a member of NCSS (the National Council for the Social Studies) since 2003, member of AERA (American Educational Research Association) since 2004, member of CIES (Comparative and International Education Society) since 2002, member of ASCD (Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development) since 2005, and member of NYSCSS (New York State Council for the Social Studies) since 2008. I serve as reviewer and volunteer for the NCSS, and AERA to read proposals for their annual conferences. I also serve as reviewer for Social Studies Research and Practice.

At the college level, I am currently the UUP alternative delegate for our department. I particiapted in the Delegate Assembly in Buffalo in September, 2007. I was invited to serve as a member of the ACE Leadership Team and meet for two hours every other week in spring and fall 2008 with colleagues across the campus to discuss how to internationalize the curriculum and enrich international experiences of both faculty and students. Within that Leadership Team, I signed up to serve on the subcommittee of Student International Experiences, which met for one hour every two weeks in spring and fall semesters of 2008. I attended conferences, shared comments, and visited other departments' faculty meetings when they presented their international programs and plans. I also serve as a member of the Advisory Board/Council for the Center for Peace, Ethics, and Social Justice on campus. I reviewed articles for the Center and its academic journal and the board meetings as a regular member.

At the level of School of Education, I was recently elected to serve on School Curriculum Committee. I have been participating in the School-initiated Professional School Development process and attended meetings whenever I can.

At the department level, I was appointed to serve on three Search Committees for three positions in research, social studies, and educational technology respectively in 2006, 2007, and 2008. I had been a member of the Equity, Diversity, and International Program Committee from 2005 to 2009 until that committee dissolved in spring 2009 according to the department decision. I served as Chair for this committee since fall 2008. With the committee members, we proposed changes to the process of handling professional dispositional issues of students in our programs, and proposed changes to the bylaws concerning this committee and the establishment of a new International Activities Committee.Recently, I volunteered myself to serve on an ad-hoc committee on professional dispositions of teacher candidates in our program. I firmly believe that professional dispositions are as important as, if not more than, knowledge and skills of our teacher candidates in their professional development. I participated in NCATE reports discussions in our department and shared my expertise and opinions on drafts of reports.

Except for spring 2007 when I was on no-pay family leave in China and spring 2009 when I was on Drescher research leave, I volunteered every semester at the Children's Museum. When I volunteered at the Children's Museum, Dr. Kudela asked her students to come to my session to work with local children and families who visited the museum for informal activities. I taught teacher candidates how to fold paper into all kinds of items -- "Origami" -- and then they taught young children. Participating in planning and organizing these activities has been a fruitful and rewarding experience for me. The spring semester of 2008 I facilitated activities there to include the celebration of Chinese New Year - the Spring Festival. Together with Dr. Susan Stratton, and Dr. Emilie Kudela, I will write a grant proposal to get more funding to host activities at Children's Museum. Our activities on Feburary 2, 2008 were featured in Cortland Standard on Feburary 4, 2008. In fall 2009, Prof. Haiying Wang from ICC of SUNY Cortland and I will host a free Chinese language/culture class for local children at the museum. We plan to offer such classes on a more regular basis if we can identify a local need for such services.

While I continued to serve at the Children's Musuem to integrate the art of Origami into early childhood activities, I was invited by the Ithca East Lansing High School and Ithaca High School in spring 2009 to present on contemporary China. Using graphic arts, commercial ads, and photographs, I asked the audience, who were aged 14-18 to interprete a "China" in their own words. While I made them aware of the bias in my selection of photos, I encouraged them to be aware of the importance of diversity and multiple perspectives in understanding a modern China. Both presentations were well received. I was also invited by the Syracuse Center of Asian Studies to present at its regional Asian Studies Symposium for teachers on the topic of the Korean War and textbook analysis.

My Cortland experience has been rewarding because I found myself more confident about working as an assistant professor in a U.S. institution of higher education. Except for the unpaid family leave I took out of necessity and family crisis, I worked very hard to make sure that students find their learning experience worthwhile in my courses. I realized that I gain the most when I put forth extra efforts to keeping in step with other colleagues who are experienced teachers in the program. It is rewarding to learn new things every day and keep a balance between professional and family life. My professional life has been going well. Together with excellent teaching and service, three publications in peer-reviewed journals and multiple presentations at national conferences qualified me for DSI -- Discretionary Salary Increase in 2007, and again in 2008 with more scholarly work. I have been maintainig a rigous agenda of scholarly work. I have presented at least one paper every year since fall 2005 at the annual conferences of both NCSS, the National Council for the Social Studies, and AERA, the American Education and Research Association. Starting from spring 2009, I have presented at the annual conferences of CIES (Comparative and International Education Society) and NYSCSS (New York State Council for the Social Studies).

My Cortland experience has been successful because I found myself feeling more confident about teaching at Cortland than I felt at the beginning of fall 2005. My motto in teaching is that I strive for excellence not for perfection. My relationship with students has been excellent and the Course Teacher Evaluations for the past semesters confirmed that. I feel greatly encouraged. Hard work pays off in many ways. With the support of Dr. Susana Davidenko, I was awarded the (Peter) Fine Teaching Award to have one course release in spring 2008 to develop a children's literature -based social studies program. I am looking forward to developing new courses and participating in more curriculum development activities.

Please click here or Service on the left-hand side for further reflections and evidence that support my reflections.

As you scroll down the topics listed on the left-hand bar of this homepage, I would like to say that I am very grateful for this opportunity to be reviewed again for continuing appointment AND promotion to associate professor. Thank you for your time and comments.

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