It’s a dream! I’m looking forward to dipping into the pools of wisdom of the leading scholars in our field, and hopefully, adding to that pool through my own work. The support and mentorship from the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship enables me to engage in deep discussions with scholars whom I have not yet had the privilege of working with. Excited is an understatement!
A special shout out to the best advisors ever, Professor Glynda Hull and Professor Erin Murphy-Graham! They’ve supported me through every obstacle in my doctoral journey and have been instrumental in my receiving this amazing opportunity.
I started graduate school hoping to better understand how schools take a global turn, and how various educational stakeholders envision and implement such schooling to serve local communities both in the U.S. and internationally. This proclivity in research interests led me to dual language immersion schooling in the U.S. as one facet of globally oriented schooling for my dissertation project, and my experience collaborating with schools that serve diverse urban communities during fieldwork shaped the rest of my study. I’ve been so inspired by how families, teachers, and school and district leadership who come from different backgrounds work together to better the schooling of even more diverse students.
Being a researcher at Berkeley
UC Berkeley, our School of Education and other Berkeley programs like Global Metropolitan Studies have helped me immerse myself in communities of caring and innovative scholars and colleagues who push my thinking forward. It’s an immense privilege to be thinking and writing alongside my committee members, Profs. Glynda Hull, Erin Murphy-Graham, Daniel Perlstein, and Youtien Hsing, as well as non-committee mentors like Profs. Kris Gutierrez and Sarah Freedman who have all provided guidance in formulating my current project through their comments and piercing insights.
Global aspirations: K-12 Mandarin-English dual immersion schooling for diverse communities
My dissertation examines 1) the trans/national and district-level political and economic conditions shaping the growth of Mandarin-English dual immersion (MEDI) schooling in the US, and 2) how differently positioned educational actors like district and school leaders, parents, teachers, and students come to experience and negotiate globally circulating values and practices around MEDI in urban contexts. In order to weave mutually imbricated macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis, I employ qualitative, discursive, and spatial methods to analyze digital media content, geospatial data, interviews, as well as ethnographic field notes and documents.
Dual language immersion programs have proliferated across the US in recent years but there is a dearth of research on MEDI programs. My dissertation first traces power-making projects of the US and China that constitute the market and values around Mandarin-English immersion schooling. Then, through a case of a diverse MEDI school in an urban school district in Northern California, my study illuminates locally contingent MEDI schools as sites where geopolitical, racial, socioeconomic, and linguistic power is (re)produced through interrelated, iterative interactions between differently positioned educational actors. By privileging the variegated experiences of racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse actors, however, this study also extends existing literatures to redraw new lines of stratification vis-à-vis actors’ relationship to each other and to resources like Mandarin learning both in and out of classrooms. In so doing, my study highlights complex and nuanced everyday experiences of MEDI at the intersections of political economy, urban sociology, and bilingual schooling.