Saturday, November 12, 2011

Division C GSC Featured Scholar



Tang T. Heng
Teachers College, Columbia University

Tang is an active AERA member who is serving as the Division C campus liaison for Teachers College, Columbia University. Additionally, Tang is the graduate student representative for the Research in Education of Asian and Pacific Americans Special Interest Group. She reports benefiting from opportunities to interact with scholars across the country both online and in person.

Tang shared that she enjoys serving the Teachers College community by helping to build networks of scholars with shared interests. There are several activities that support AERA at Teachers College, including dinner discussions that allow AERA presenters to share their research and prepare for presentations. Additionally, Tang started a Facebook page for students to dialogue about their research and AERA happenings at Teachers College.

Tang attended the 2011 AERA conference and her experiences were quite positive! She shared that attending AERA at New Orleans was a wonderful mix of work and play. There was a wide range of high quality speakers, and it was exciting to put a face to authors she had been reading. Tang also found the graduate student activities tremendously beneficial. Tang indicated that she learned a lot about how to manage her dissertation journey and prepare for life after graduation. Tang also had the opportunity to present her research. She confided that her initial assumptions were that that no one would likely show up for her session at 8:15am on the last day of the conference. However, she was pleasantly surprised by the turnout! Tang noted that this goes to show one should never assume and always be prepared!

Although Tang has not determined a definitive position that she will seek upon graduation, any institution would be fortunate to have her. Tang’s research interests include immigration and education, cross-cultural adaptation of learning, social learning, culturally-responsive pedagogy, and curriculum design and evaluation. Tang recently published a case study, in the Early Childhood Education Journal, examining sociocultural misalignments faced by preschool Chinese emergent bilinguals at a Head Start Center. Additionally, upon factoring in feedback that she received at AERA 2011, she has submitted another article on the nature of interactions between low-income immigrant families and school staff for review.

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