International student Bernard Kigotho Njuguna with Professor Michael Furlong at the fall 2103 presentation.
As one part of its celebration of International Education Week last fall, the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education hosted a reception for the School’s visiting scholars, international students, faculty, and campus and community friends. At that event, four students gave brief presentations of their work, making clear the power of global diversity. A graduate student participant remarked in an email to Gevirtz School Associate Dean Hsiu-Zu Ho that the event “modeled the process of recognizing and creating opportunities to learn from the wisdom of our international students, allowing them to learn and teach, building bridges across words and worlds and developing institutional intercultural competence!”
The four student presenters were: (1) Hala Sun, a first-year Ph.D. student in Education from South Korea and recipient of a Dean’s Ambassador Circle scholarship. With a multicultural background and fluency in five languages, Sun is interested in studying heritage language maintenance and educational policies related to immigrant students’ academic performance;
(2) Ti Wu, a third-year Ph.D. student in Education from China with an emphasis in Cultural Perspectives and Comparative Education who is also affiliated with our interdisciplinary emphasis in Writing Studies. Her current research is on the development of writing abilities for international students in American universities;
(3) Bernard Kigotho Njuguna, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Counseling, Clinical and School Psychology, from Kenya. Njuguna’s dissertation research is titled: “Assessing behavior and emotional disorder among adolescents 13-18 years in Kenya;”
(4) Affiliated with two additional campus interdisciplinary emphases (Global Studies and Language Interaction and Social Organization), Tatzia Langlo, a Gilman international scholar is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Education specializing in cultural perspectives and comparative education. Langlo spoke about her work in global education based on two of her publications “Development of global learning and teaching communities: Citizen action and engagement in research” and “Do we spy a kind of hope? Critical social literacy in Kurdistan.”
“These students are just a few of our many scholars in the Gevirtz School who embark on international research,” Associate Dean Ho remarks. “The international research as well as the diverse and rich perspectives that our international students and scholars bring to the learning, discovery and cultural life of our campus is greatly valued.”