Lin Lin - Assistant Professor


Scholarly Work

I understand that faculty scholarly activities involve passion, originality, creativity, collaboration, a thorough grounding in previous scholarly work, and effective communication of contributions through teaching, presentations, and publications.In terms of scholarly work, I have confidence to state that I have exceeded the requirements for continuing appointment and promotion to associate professor.

According to the requirements for scholarly work, I am supposed to have one publication every two years. During the last four years, I have published five peer-reviewed journal articles in key journals of social studies education. All the journals are key journals in social studies education. Within the same period of time, I have made eighteen presentations. Fifteen of them were made at academic conferences at national and regional conferences of social studies education. Two of them were made at the invitation of Ithaca East Lansing High School. One of them was made jointly with Dr. Shufang Shi on campus during the International Education Month, November 2009. Our presentation topic is "Education in China." Here are pictures for our joint exhibition for the monthly initiative on campus.

In this section, I will share a reflective essay to highlight key features of my scholarly work. I will explain my publications in scholarly and intellectural journals, my presentations of papers and research reports at conferences and seminars, completion of unpublished work, and work in progress including exploratory research. .

For evidence of my scholarly work in the form of editorial service for scholarly journals and academic conference proposal reviews, please click on Professional Development, on which page I explained in detail how I integrate my service as reviewers and editors for scholarly journals and my service to professional and learned societies.

Towards the end of this section, you will view a list of my internal and external grant applications and their results in the past four years.

My scholarship interests continue to be in the general areas of social studies curriculum and instruction, elementary teacher education, multicultural education, and comparative and international education. I continue to maintain a rigorous record of making presentations at conferences of all levels and submitting manuscripts for publications in peer-reviewed journals.

There are five major features of my scholarly work. I will explain each feature on this page.

1) Keeping a Rigorous Record of Presentations and Publications in Social Science Education
2) Conducting Reserach to Benefit Local Shool Chidren and A Wider Academic Community
3) Promoting Global and Comparative Education in Teacher Education Programs
4) Integrating Professional Development Experiences into Teaching and Scholarly Work
5) Evaluating the Teacher Education Curriculum and Instruction through Collaboration

I'll elaborate on each feature.

1) Keeping a Rigorous Record of Publications and Presentations in Social Science Education

After my first reappointment in 2006 and second reappointment in 2008, I had taken into serious consideration the suggestions and comments made by the reviewers in the last two reappointment processes. One of the suggestions was that I revise conference presentation papers and submit to peer-reviewed journals. I followed their suggestion and as a result, I have successfully published five peer-reviewed journal articles in top journals of social studies education since fall 2005. All these journals are leading journals in the fields of the social studies and social science education. One of them is a journal published in Chinese language in mainland China. I am pleased to share with you that I have exceeded the requirements for continued appointment and promotion to associate professorship.

From fall 2005 to fall 2009, I have made seventeen (17) presentations at conferences of all levels. Fifteen of the seventeen presentations were made at academic conferences participated by scholars from all around the world in cities in the United States.

History is an essential component of social studies curriculum and instruction. How to promote the historical thinking skills of pre-service elementary school teachers and those of young learners has always been a learning objective in my EDU375/EDU378/EDU480 courses. I use primary and secondary sources to help students reflect on how "school/textbook" history differs from academic history and help them understand that history is an interpretative business. Teaching EDU640 Conflict and Controversy in Social Education and EDU524 Democracy and Social Education, both graduate courses, allows me to have great opportunities to discuss with in-service and pre-service teachers their views on controversies in history and how they teach about controversies in their own classrooms. One of the controversies we discussed in class is the Japanese history textbook controversy. With researchers from Japan, Korea, and China, I made a presentation entitled "A War of Words: Textbooks, History, and Politics Today - A Joint Presentation by Social Studies Educators from U.S. , China , Japan , and South Korea" at the International Assembly of the Annual Conference of the National Council for the Social Studies in Washington D.C. on December 1-3, 2006. The interactive presentation was made in a workshop session of 2 hours. I identified another controversial issue to work with scholars from other countries. In the 87th Annual Conference of NCSS on November 30, 2007, I led a joint presentation with a title "Whosel History? An Analysis of the Korean War in History textbooks from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China". It was very well received at the conference. I continued to work with scholars in other campuses and countries to explore different foci in teaching about WWII. We submitted our manuscript to the Journal of Curriculum Studies in spring 2011.

After our joint presentation at NCSS (the National Council for the Social Studies) in Washington, DC, in 2007, I led a team of international scholars to write a manuscript based on our presentation on the topic of the Korean War. I submitted that manuscript entitled "Whose History? An Analysis of the Korean War in History Textbooks from the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China" to the Social Studies, and received favorable and postive comments from its editoral board.

On November 5, 2009, the September/October issue of the Social Studies in 2009 has our article published (Please click on the link to read the article).

We were greatly encouraged by the editor's comments and decided to write two different manuscripts as our "consumer's version" just for the classroom teachers, the "consumers" and users of our lesson plans. One of these new manuscripts with a title as "Teaching Historical and Current Events from Multiple Perspectives: The Korean War and Six-Party Talks", was designed for American teachers. It was sent to the Social Studies Research and Practice journal in Janurary, 2009 and was informed that our manuscript was accepted for publication on its fall issue of 2009.

The other new manuscript for Chinese teachers, entitled as"Teaching the Korean War from Multiple Perspectives", was sent to History Teaching and was published on the third issue of its 2009 journal. History Teaching is a top journal of social studies teaching in China. The journal started in 1950 and published in over 20 countries). We submitted the manuscript in English. Editors of the journal asked their translators to translate the manuscript in Chinese and sent the translated article for our review. We reviewed the article and made revisions to make sure translated article conveyed what we argued in the orginal paper.

On April 25, 2009, I was invited as a keynote speaker for seminars hosted by the Five College Center for East Asian Studies, an affiliated organization under NCTA - National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA) seminars offer K-12 educators the opportunity to explore East Asian history, geography, culture, literature, arts, and language with New York's top scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean studies. The program provides K-12 teachers with content background and pedagogical techniques for integrating East Asia into their curriculums. For spring 2009, they invited me to share content background and pedagogical techniques to teach about the Korean War using multiple textbook excerpts from six different nations. My presentation was entitled, "Textbooks Reveal Different Perspectives of the Korean War".

On April 24, 2009, I was invited as a guest speaker to talk about a modern China at Ithaca Lansing High School in six 9th grade Global Studies classes. Students asked great questions about Modern China during the whole day presentations. Here is a list of their questions and my presentation slide show.

My other scholarly work were published on journals including International Education Journal and Social Studies Research and Practice. Please view a list of publications and presentations by clicking here.

Research Project in Progress:
  1. At the 2008 NCSS's annual conference in Houston, Texas, a professor from Taiwan and I co-presented our paper entitled "Making sense of who we are in a new perspective: An analysis of high school textbooks in Taiwan and Mainland China". At 2009's CIES (Comparative and International Education Society)'s annual conference in Charleston, South Carolina, I presented a paper entitled " National identity represented in high school history textbooks from Taiwan and Mainland China". At both conferences, our papers were well received and the audience provided us with thoughtful comments and suggestions to improve our paper. We will submit our manuscript to the Social Studies in the fall of 2009.
  2. I submitted a proposal to the 2009's NCSS Annual Conference and the International Assembly, in Atlanta, GA, November, 2009. The title of the presentation is "Using TIME Magazine Cover Images to Teach How the United States Perceive China in Post-Cold War Era (1990 to Current)." I plan to submit a manscript to the Social Education and a different manuscript to the Social Studies Research and Practice as a "consumer version" for classroom teachers.

2) Conducting Research to Benefit Local School Children and A Wider Academic Community

Based on a presentation I made at 2006's NCSS annual conference, I worked on a manuscript entitled “ Notable Trade Book Lesson Plan: Amelia to Zora : Twenty-six women who changed the world”. With this project, I was awarded the Teaching Innovation Grant in fall 2006 at SUNY Cortland. The peer-reviewed electronic journal Social Studies Research and Practice (http://socstrp.org/index.cfm ) published it in its fall (November) 2007 issue. My scholarly work in this field did not stop here. I continued to explore the effective ways to help young learners acquire social studies knowledge, skills, and values through reading children's books.

From teaching EDU375 Social Studies Method course, I learned to develop the LESS program, which encouraged all learners to construct content knowledge , refine reading and social studies skills, and develop civic values to understand and live in this increasingly interdependent and culturally diverse world. LESS stands for Literature-based Elementary Social Studies. The program was supported by Faculty Development Center as they awarded the first FINE TEACHING AWARD to me for the development of the LESS program. I continued to build upon the LESS program, and applied for the 2008's Faculty Research Program Grant. I was awarded the FRP in summer of 2008 and completed the proposal for conducting the project during the Drescher Leave. Due to staffing challenge in the department, I postponed the Drescher Leave to spring 2009. I have been very grateful for having the opportunity to work on this project.

In spring 2009, I was awarded the Drescher Leave Award to conduct a children's literature-based social studies program and to examine its effectiveness on children's reading comprehension. This project was funded by UUP's Drescher Leave Award and the Faculty Research Award I earned in summer 2008. The purpose of the project is to develop a Literature-based Elementary Social Studies (LESS) Program and examine the LESS' program's effects on reading comprehensions of elementary students.

To read a proposed project for the Drescher Award, please click here.
To read a full application for the Drescher Award, please click here.
To view a recommendation letter to UUP from the Provost to support my application, please click here.
To read my statement to accept the award and return to campus in fall 2009, please click here.
To read the IRB approval letter, please click here.
To read the letter from Dean/Dr. Gerald Porter to congratulate me on getting this grant, please click here.
To read the project evaluation I wrote up for Drescher leave award, please click here.

The project was conducted in spring 2009 in two local elementary schools after the project was approved by Cortland City School District in December, 2008, by participating local schools in Feburary and March, 2009, and the IRB (Institutional Review Board) of SUNY Cortland in April, 2009.

The title of the project is "LESS is more." The Literacy-based Elementary Social Studies (LESS) program was used in this project . It is abbrievated as LESS, but I expect that LESS is more. The LESS program provided a list of selected high quality children's books that were used as a basis for teaching the ten thematic strands of social studies identified by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in 1994 , along with reading logs that students complete as they read each book. The LESS program was a resource for K-6 pre-service and in-service teachers to improve students' reading and social studies knowledge, skills, and values.This project was approved by IRB (Institutional Review Board) of SUNY Cortland on April 13, 2009.

Research Project in Progress
  1. Data of the project entitled "LESS is more" has been collected and is being analyzed. A proposal was written and sent to AERA for its annual conference in 2010 to report the result of the project that was conducted in spring 2009.
  2. Analysis of reading logs of the students in this study is being conducted. Analysis of the pre-tests, mid-point tests, and posttests of the students in this study is being conducted.
  3. A proposal of the project was sent to AERA for its annual conference in 2010. Once the data gets analyzed, a manuscript will be written up to report and share the results of the project. The manuscript will be sent to Theory and Research in Social Education.
  4. On November 5, 2009, I was informed that my proposal about the LESS program research to present at AERA in 2010 was accepted.

3) Promoting Global and Comparative Education in Teacher Education Programs

In all the elementary teacher education courses I have taught, I share with students and help them realize that people throughout the world have basic needs in their everyday lives. Such a global perspective is necessary and critical in the elementary classroom as well as in pre-service and inservice teacher education programs. One of the NCSS (National Council for the Social Studies) social studies standards is Global Connections. I make this strand a key feature in all my courses and scholarly work.

Since I came to Cortland, I submitted my first internal grant proposal of a survey study with the title "Geopolitical Knowledge and Global Awareness of Pre-Service Teachers". It was submitted as a 2006 Summer Research Fellowship project and was not accepted. I revised it and resubmitted to the Dean's Research Funds in School of Education in spring 2006 and was awarded a small grant of $1000. I went through the IRB training in May 2006 and was awarded the certificate. I will submit an application to IRB for its approval of the project this semester.

My long term goal is to carry out a cross-cultural survey project on global awareness with the collaboration of two faculty members from other universities. My short term goal is to conduct a project entitled " Geopolitical Knowledge and Global Awareness of Pre-Service Teachers" among participants who are pre-service elementary teachers in fall 2009 and publish an article reporting the results of the project in spring 2010.

Concurrently I am working on two projects. One project is a joint research project -- a cross cultural survey project on raising global awareness of cross-cultural differences and international events. Dr. John D. Hoge, associate professor of social studies from the University of Georgia, and Dr. Yali Zhao, assistant professor of social studies and multicultural education from Georgia State University, are my collaborators in this project. Dr. Yali Zhao is the lead researcher. We presented the paper at the International Assembly at the Annual Conference of the National Council for the Social Studies in November, 2005 in Kansas City, Missouri. The paper was peer-reviewed, selected for publication at NCSS -- International Assembly's website.The online version is available at http://adewaallucas.iweb.bsu.edu/ When you get to that page, please click on Conference at the right-hand side, scroll down the page, and find among papers published online under the name of Yali, Zhao in 2005. The paper was published on International Education Journal (IEJ) in April, 2007. I shared the news of this presentation with SUNY Cortland community about my presentation in the December issue of the Cortland Bulletin.

My other publications all had a strong theme in global and comparative education. The articles on the Korean War topic used comparative discourse analysis methods to examine textbook representations of historical events and encouraged students to come back to the essential questions such as, What is history? Whose history are we talking about?

My dissertation study was about the learning experiences of Chinese international students in programs of social sciences, humanities, and education. My long-term goal was to publish a book to document the learning experiences of such a unique group of learners. My short-term goal was to publish an article from my dissertation and continue to conduct research in international education to help international students at SUNY Cortland achieve their potential in a new learning environment. I plan to publish an article in Chinese in Journal of Education to share the research findings with researchers in China to improve curriculum and instruction in graduate programs of social sciences, humanities, and education.

For my dissertation study, I did a semi-structured in-depth interview study of Chinese students in US graduate programs of social sciences, humanities and education. The study examines their perceptions of differences between the two systems and explores how students from a different academic culture develop higher order thinking to meet the requirements of graduate programs in the United States. Please click here for the abstract of my dissertation. Upon graduation from the University of Georgia in 2004, this dissertation study together with five courses in qualitative research methods qualified me for Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Graduate Certificate in the University of Georgia.

I submitted a part of the dissertation to International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (QSE) before I came to work at SUNY Cortland. The proposal of this paper was accepted by the AERA Annual Conference in 2004. Due to a back surgery and the birth of my son, I had to cancel the presentation. I resubmitted to the AERA Annual Conference in 2005 and presented the paper in April, 2006. Then the rejection letter arrived from QSE editors. The editors suggested that I could revise the paper and submit it to a less theoretical journal in the field of qualitative research. I plan to revise the manuscript and submit it to International Higher Education by the end of this fall semester of 2006.

Research Project in Progress
  1. We plan to seek external funding for this project in 2010 from the Spencer Foundation and Ford Foundation. Currently, Dr. Zhao and I are seeking internal grants from our respective institutions. Her internal grant was conditionally approved. I will submit my application for an internal grant by the end of spring semester of 2010.
  2. Based on the findings from my dissertation, I am working on a manuscript to publish in Chinese in the Journal of Higher Education, an education journal in China. I expect to exchange insights with researchers on how to improve instruction and curriculum in graduate programs of social sciences, humanities, and education in China.
  3. I am serving on the subcommittee for Internationalizing student experiences, a committee afffiliated to ACE Internationalization Leadership Team. As a committee, we developed a survey to evaluate international students' learning experiences at SUNY Cortland. Our goal is to help international students at SUNY Cortland achieve their potential in a new learning environment.
  4. I will submit an IRB proposal in spring 2010 to conduct the interview with international students.

4) Integrating Professional Development Experiences into Teaching and Scholarly Work

The academic conferences and presentations I attended are the best professional development experiences I could have. While I continue to pursue such opportunities, I made great efforts to attend summer institutes on and off campus to gain experiences in teaching the topics in which I would like to develop more competence. In the summer of 2008, I participated in three summer workshops -- the Holocaust Education summer institute in Washington DC, Summer Institute for Teaching Diversity, and Summer Ethics Institute at SUNY Cortland.

Attending the Holocaust Institute for Teacher Educators (HITE) in Washington, DC, June 2 – 6, 2008 was a life-changing experience for me. It was a professional development opportunity for teacher educators. It was sponsored and hosted by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) will host the second Holocaust Institute for Teacher Educators (HITE). The week I spent at the Institute, which was held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. with colleagues from teacher education programs from other universities all across the United States allowed me to learn the content knowledge, skills, and values to teach about the Holocaust and other genocides. In the fall of 2008, I used what I learned from the summer institute in my method courses and facilitated a seminar session to help pre-service teachers to use primary sources to learn about the non-Jewish victims during the Holocaust. I plan to continue doing this in my method courses in the fall of 2009 and write up the students' learning experiences and my teaching experience. As I was preparing for this portfolio, there was a bill that had been introduced in the House and Senate of the United States. I fully supported this bill to be passed for the Congress to fund Holocaust Education.  You can read about the bill at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-892 Please join me to pressure the US Senators and Representatives to support and fund this bill.

Attending the summer workshop on teaching for multicultural education and diversity on campus in the summer of 2008 was a meaningful experience for me. At the workshop, I met colleagues from different departments on campus, who have done remarkable work in teaching for multicultural education and an increasingly diverse world. I shared what I have done in my courses and plan to integrate the theories and best practices in my own teaching and scholarly work. In the fall of 2008, I used the name activity in my method class. The activiy allowed students to reflect on their own ethnic/family history, which was always overlooked. I used the movies other colleagues suggested to use and shared with other teachers the movies I used to teach about awarness of diversity in today's world to best prepare students to be reflective teachers. One course assignment for EDU375/480 Elementary Social Studies Methods is that each student reads a multicultural biography of a historical figure at the level of 4th grade or above and designs a lesson plan or a poster board with detailed procedures on how to teach social studies concepts using the biography. My goal to explore ways to best help pre-service and in-service teachers use multicultural biographies to teach social studies concepts/themes. I wrote a paper based on my presentation at NCSS in November 2006 and the paper was published in November 2007 on the peer-reviewed Social Studies Research and Practice.

I applied to the Summer Ethics and Social Justice Institute on campus in the summer of 2008. Not only did I learn about the best practices of my colleagues when they integrated ethics discussions in their courses, but also I developed a much deeper understanding of the pervasiveness of ethical issues embedded in our life and in teacher education in particular. For example, it became an ethical decision of any teacher to engage students or not in his or her daily classroom. One could lecture without considering if students are learning or not. One could stop lecturing and seek students' comments in order to provide opportunities for students to learn. Teaching without learning is an oxymoron. However, in reality, we see so many cases in which teachers deliver what they prepare for the audience without even knowing what that audience needs. It is significant for students to realize that motivating learners with hands-on, minds-on, and hearts-on lesson ideas is after all an ethical decision. In my method classes, I started to faciliate a discussion at the first session about students' personal goals in life, professional goals, and their questions about themselves and questions about the world. When I showed them the list of such essential input they shared with me the next session, they realized that the course syllabus of this social studies method course was composed based on their needs, interests, goals, and wishes. Each topic of that syllabus answers their questions about themselves and the world.

Research Project in Progress

  1. In the fall of 2009, I plan to collaborate with Dr. Katina Sayers-Walker and other teachers in my team to integrate professional dispositions into our courses and make discussions of ethical issues a key and integral part of our teaching.
  2. Teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the childhood programs provides me a great deal of opportunities for action research. I am writing on a research proposal to see what activities and course assignments could best engage and motivate students in social studies learning.
  3. I have been using different strategies in my coures to explore best ways to motivate students to come up with hands-on, minds-on, and hearts-on learning activities. These strategies included reflection essays, global awareness posters, multicultural biography billboards, field trips, social studies webquest or virtual field trips, and cooperative social studies unit plans. I collected students' work after I had their permission. I will submit an IRB proposal to conduct an action research study on this topic.
  4. I plan to collaborate with teacher education students on a voluntary basis to use multicultural biographies to teach elementary students in one-on-one and small group settings. Teacher education students will teach, observe, and document their teaching experiences and reflect on their lesson plans. I plan to encourage them to present their research projects at Scholar's Day at SUNY Cortland in spring 2010.

5) Evaluating the Teacher Education Curriculum and Instruction through Collaboration

The short term goal was to collaborate with faculty members in my department on a teacher education curriculum development project. Prof. Judith Schillo initiated the project and interviewed first-year teachers, all of whom graduated as Childhood Education majors from SUNY Cortland. I was invited to help analyze the interview data and write up the final report.

The purpose of the project is to help assess the effectiveness of course assignments in our program from the perspectives of graduates from the Childhood and Early Childhood program for curriculum and program development. It will provide inspiration and advice for the current pre-service teachers in the program on what is expected of them in future practice. Our IRB application was approved by SUNY Cortland.

We applied to the College Assessment Committee's Assessment Incentive Grant Program in June, 2006 and were awarded $2000.

We submitted a proposal entitled "Voices from the Field: How First Year Teachers Perceive Teacher Education Program Preparation" to present the results of the study at the Annual Hawaii International Conference on Education in Honolulu, Hawaii in January 6-9, 2007. The lead researcher is Prof. Judith Schillo. The proposal was accepted and presented by Judith Schillo.

We presented another paper entitled 'Sink or Swim': How First Year Teachers Perceive Teacher Education Program Preparation" to present at the annual conference of AERA -- American Education Research Association in Chicago, IL in April, 2007. The paper was presented by Dr. Kim during my family leave.

Utilizing the I-Life suite of multimedia software, which we learned from EDU630 last semester, Dr. HeeYoung Kim and I selected and edit video excerpts from the data collected by Prof. Judith Schillo and make a DVD to share what participants in our study said about our elementary teacher education programs and what they would like to share with our teacher candidates.

Research Project in Progress

Prof. Judith Schillo and I are working to revise the paper for publication in a teacher education journal. We will find similar research in the field of program assessment and strengthen the part of literature review of our paper. We haven't decided which journal to submit to. We plan to complete the manscript in the spring of 2010.

Internal Grants/Awards Applications

Since I came to Cortland in fall, 2008, I have applied for a number of internal grants. Most of them were successful. Writing applications of grants is a learning process for me and I come to conclude that successful grant applications will greatly enhance teaching, scholarly work, and service.

 

2011-2012

  • I received an unsolicited request for my research/scholarly work from a graduate student in Ohio State University.
  • I applied for the ASC Grant to bring Dr. Mary Johnson from FACING HISTORY and "FREEDOM RIDERS", a PBS documentary to campus with the collaboration from Drs. Shufang Shi, Katina Sayers-Walker, Profs Karen Hempson and Vaerie Jones. We were awarded $1000.

2010-2011

  • I applied for the Dean's Travel Fund to attend and presenta at the 90th Annual Confererence of the National Council for the Social Studies in Denver, Colorado in Nov. 11 -14, 2010. I was awarded $800.
  • I applied for the IDA (Independent Development Award) to cover the travel airfare for attending NCSS and was awarded $314.

2009-2010

  • I applied for the Dean's Travel Fund to attend and present at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference in Atlanta, GA in November 11-15, 2009. I was awarded $800.
  • I applied for the IDA (Independent Development Award) to cover the registration fee for attending NCSS and was awarded $267.

2008 - 2009

2007-2008

2006-2007 (on no-pay leave in spring 2007)

2005-2006

External Grants Application

As an international faculty member and an alien by immigration status, I am not eligible for many external grants, which are very enticing to me, but which are targeted for U.S. citizens or permenant citizens. Therefore, I haven't applied to any external grant to support my research projects. Once my status changes, I will apply for external grants.

Miscellaneous Scholarly Activities

  • March, 2010, as I reviewed the materials sent from Teacher Created Materials, I identified an error in one of their units on education of African Americans after the Civil War. I wrote to the editor of the TCM publications and received their letter.

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