Liyun Wendy Choo: Kia ora koutou, my name is Liyun Wendy Choo and I am a new lecturer in the ICEd program at TC. In case you’re wondering, both Liyun and Wendy are my legal names and I’m happy for you to address me using either name. 

I am from the city-state of Singapore (see the map below), nicknamed the “Little Red Dot”. Singapore is the size of Lake Taupo in New Zealand, the country where I currently reside. 

Source:http://simon-ang.blogspot.com/2012/01/little-red-dot.html 

I started my teaching career at Millennia Institute, a public pre-university institution in Singapore as a history teacher and spent 2 years at the Academy of Singapore Teachers working on policies related to in-service teacher professional development. When I left Millennia Institute in 2016, I was the Head of the Department and since then, I have taught in a variety of countries, including Lao PDR, Myanmar, and New Zealand, all of which made me more aware of the need to consider ways for learners to bring their experiences and expertise into the learning. 

The final country I taught in before joining TC is New Zealand. I would say it most influenced my thinking about tertiary teaching and the role of public universities. An idea that really struck me when I first came to New Zealand is that academics are legally obliged to act as the critic and conscience of society. This requires public intellectuals to draw on learning from research to raise society’s consciousness about its pressing and latent problems by engaging citizens in public debates. I find this notion very fascinating and meaningful and keep that in mind when I design the curriculum. 

Before joining the ICEd program, I was a Professional Teaching Fellow at the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, specializing in the academic support of international students. Unlike the USA, New Zealand borders were closed until very recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so many international students had to start or continue their programmes offshore. It was a very meaningful experience that developed my interest in New Zealand's international education and care in higher education settings. 

As a new Ph.D. graduate, I am very excited about the opportunity to engage with renowned scholars in my field and to teach in the areas that I am passionate about. Perhaps because of the comparativist streak in me, I am also curious about academia and the ICEd and doctoral programme in the US and how things might differ between countries. I hope to bring my understanding of Southeast Asia and the diverse teaching and learning experiences I have had to the Program. I also seek to expand existing understandings of citizenship beyond the dominant liberal-republican divide. 

Similar to my teaching, my research is located within the critical paradigm, which is concerned with social issues related to power relations, social control, emancipation, and values. Thus, my work is politically motivated and driven by the desire to give voice to the marginalized and to critique oppressive social structures. As a critical realist who sees reality as stratified and laminated, I believe that an adequate explanation of any social phenomenon requires the integration of knowledge from different disciplines, so I do not confine my research to particular disciplines. However, I locate my research in Citizenship Studies and Comparative Education, which are concerned with issues of social justice and emancipation. I am particularly interested in issues related to youth identities, citizenship and education in Southeast Asia. My long-term research goal is to further understandings of how social identities and physical locations affect young people’s agency and citizenship in conflict-affected, postcolonial contexts through comparative approaches. 

I am currently working on a variety of research projects, many of which investigate the impact of COVID-19 on students and teachers. I am also exploring international students’ experiences of higher education in New Zealand during the pandemic and Myanmar youth’s everyday life during the civil disobedience movement. I enjoy hiking, listening to Chinese pop, and watching Japanese anime and Korean dramas. 

I would like to end off with a message to my students and advisees: Welcome to TC! I hope you will find the time at TC fruitful and make full use of the opportunity to explore your interest and build communities. I’m more than happy to support you in your academic endeavors and hope you will find the courses I teach meaningful and intellectually stimulating. I look forward to meeting with you next month in New York.

Erina Iwasaki: 

I am very excited to join the ICEd program at TC in the Fall, particularly because I just graduated from the same program in May 2022 with a Ph.D. in Comparative and International Education! As a former student, I experienced first-hand this inspiring, supportive, and intellectually vibrant community of scholars and students. I am very honored to return as a faculty member, and I look forward to contributing to the program in my new role.

My research interests lie in language issues in educational development, particularly examining the efforts of ethnolinguistically non-dominant communities to advocate and implement education in their own languages. I am currently working on publishing some articles based on my dissertation. My dissertation thesis is entitled “National Languages, Multilingual Education, and the ‘Militants’ for Change in Senegal.” It looks at the lived experiences of self-proclaimed ‘militants’ (strong advocates with a political connotation) for Senegalese national languages in education, the extent of their multi-generational work and network, and their influence in shaping the language-in-education policy landscape at what appears to be a moment of “critical juncture” as Senegal’s National Ministry of Education adopts a national bilingual education policy in French and Senegalese languages. In the future, I would like to keep doing similar research related to language and education in different contexts. 

I also plan to continue working on a collaborative research project, which I co-founded in 2017 with my advisor and three other scholars in the field of multilingual education. The project is entitled the L1-based Multilingual Education Multilingual Systematic Literature Review and Database Development project, which takes stock of literature produced on L1-based multilingual education depending on the language of publication. So far, we took stock of L1-based multilingual education literature published in English, French, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, with talks of expanding to other languages. It is very interesting to see the different and similar perspectives on L1-based multilingual education emerging based on the language of the research. 

A multilingual person myself, I speak French, English, Japanese, Spanish, Burmese and learning some Jinghpaw and Wolof these days! I would be very happy if I can inspire students to see language as a fundamental element to study in comparative and international education and in international educational development. Depending on the context, the question of language(s) in education can tell us who and how one has access to education, as well as what is “worthy” to study in society. It can also tell us what people consider “educated” and education motivations.

I am very excited to meet my advisees and students. I am sure I am going to learn so much from you all and I look very much forward to engaging in conversations and discussions with you. I hope we will collaborate on various projects. Please feel free to reach out anytime!