Professional Statement

I am a native Southern Californian who grew up in Asia and have been fortunate to have lived my formative years abroad. These experiences in Indonesia and Taiwan have shaped my world view tremendously and as such, I see the world from an “ex-pat” lens (as I call it), acutely aware of culture, global SES, and educational inequities. This perspective thus makes me an exceptional faculty and team member to work with all stakeholders to promote social justice through just, equitable, and inclusive education.

As a Latina scholar and educator whose research focus is Eastern achievement frameworks for Western teacher education, I can appreciate a diverse and progressive faculty. Indeed, I am diverse within an already diverse filed – a Latinx scholar who studies an ethnicity and culture different from her own. This is an asset to any faculty and an example of JEIE at its finest – in other words, I not only welcome but prefer working with diverse students, faculty, parents, and community stakeholders. As such, academic path is marked with successful and innovative collaborations with a diverse faculty, within and across disciplines. My experiences abroad and my K-12 urban teaching experiences prior to becoming faculty have only been in diverse settings. Indeed, I have never studied or taught in a homogenous educational environment and cannot even imagine education with the absence of JEIE. Living abroad I attended Embassy schools in Jakarta, Indonesia and Kaoshung and Tainan, Taiwan. My neighbors, school mates, and daily experiences were Eastern, indeed! Given these circumstances, I had to learn at a very young age about not just tolerance, but to fully appreciate and embrace cultures different from my own; hence, the seeds of my commitment to JEIE were sewn. 

In Indonesia, for example, I remember the daily calls to prayer, living next door to a princess of Thailand, having Australian schoolmates, along with my Indonesian servants who lived with our family. I had a driver, gardener, cook and housekeeper (all Indonesian) and also learned how to independently navigate my Indonesian neighborhood. I can remember ladies with large water barrels on their heads and babies on their backs, all the while begging for money and touching me at every opportunity because I was an American. I remember water buffalos on the street alongside scores of motorcycles and being chased to school daily by wild geese in front of shanty houses. 

In Taiwan, I lived in former WWII soldier housing on the Army base and attended Embassy school on the Air Force Base, respectively. I was in a Chinse Girl Scout troop, went daily to the open market to see my dinner killed (such an interesting experience!), and survived mosquito net-eating, flying cockroaches no matter how clean the house was. I learned to speak Mandarin a bit and how to communicate with the soldiers on the base as well as with the locals on the street. All the while, my friends and family back home in America were going to their neighborhood 7-11 for a soda while I was boiling my own water to drink. The SES inequities between countries were and still are astronomical. Again, the seeds of JEIE were being sewn for my future as a teacher and teacher-educator for the inequities between urban and suburban students, schools, and communities in Southern California. 

My diverse K-12 teaching experiences also fuels my instruction for JEIE. My personal pedagogoical foundations were formed teaching math and science in two urban middle schools in Fontana and Long Beach USD at the beginning of my career. In these environments I learned the important lessons of urban school respect and content knowledge. Respect the student at all times and thus teacher respect is earned because of their content knowledge and by the way they treat their students. Once established, one can then apply onto this foundation various pedagogies within the content. This is as true today as it was yesterday, and I practice these JEIE foundations of respect and content expertise with every class, every student, every time. 

First-generation, urban, and working-class college students will also benefit from my strong community outreach and mentoring skills developed from these JEIE foundations and urban experiences. I encourage dialog and am excited to participate in student groups as well as community partnerships, such as those with school districts and community organizations. A team player and a proponent of social justice through JEIE, I also happily serve on any committee facilitating such outcomes, as well as relish student experiences and backgrounds to support them in broader society and serve as a mechanism to transform our schools and communities.