I am Chair of the History Department and the courses I teach include all of Asia,
all of the World, and all of the US, including Asian American and Pacific Islanders,
and many of my courses also have honors versions. My graduate specialty was in Modern
Asia and Modern World History, however I love teaching United States History as well,
and I bring my global background to those courses.
Much of my global perspective stems from my background growing up overseas in Singapore
(where my father was a professor) and a childhood spent traveling in Asia. (This also
impacts my love of food!)
I have a definite wanderlust "problem" and travel experiences are something I love
bringing into the classroom. I am also an avid study abroad junkie, and have taken
students (and my three kids) to Japan and to France.
I graduated with my MA in History from CSUF and began my doctoral program at UCLA
before leaving it to accept my current position at Mt Sac. I love continuing to learn
and bring new knowledge into the classroom and have participated in grants that allowed
me to travel and to build my curriculum in India, China, Japan, and Korea. I coordinated
a three-year federal UISFL grant project to build Chinese and Asian Studies curriculum
at Mt Sac, and my interdisciplinary team created more than 20 new teaching modules
that incorporated China.
Even more recently, I have been engaged not in content knowledge projects, but in
pedagogical ones. I want to grow as a teacher every year, and training and certifying
for Distance Learning, CORA, and ACUE were all transformative to my teaching approaches.
I have also participated in three grant projects in OERs or Open Educational Resources
which is a textbook-free approach to teaching, and most recently, I am building a
pathway for an AAT in History that is Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC).
A current and important facet of my job is my ongoing role as our Campus Faculty
Co-Coordinator for Accreditation. This is very different from my teaching assignment,
but I enjoy the work of coordinating and directing teams and writing and editing our
“Institutional Self Evaluation Report.” This is meaningful work for me in helping
the college reflect on what we are doing really well, and what we can do better!
I love the natural world and spend as much time as I can outdoors, visiting National
and State parks, hiking, bird watching, camping, backpacking, and doing all the outdoor
sports like skiing, kayaking, zip lining, and scuba diving. This interest in biology
and nature lends itself to my teaching. Environmental history is a big scholarly interest
and as part of a grant project for the National Endowment of the Humanities and the
American Historical Association, I created a series of webpages with resources for
educators who want to infuse Environmental History and Sustainability topics into
their courses. In 2022 I completed the Mt. SAC Sustainability Training course with
"Leaf" designations for my courses. In 2024, I will earn a California Naturalist Certificate
from UC Davis with a special project on transitional environments and invasive species,
which will inform both my coursework, and my contributions to citizen science in California.
