Professional Narrative

Throughout the evolution of my professional and academic careers, a few themes have emerged.  One is education, whether as a student, a teacher, or a researcher.  Another is improvement: understanding the nature of something as big as whole-district reform or as small as the online interaction between an experienced teacher and graduate students about to step in front a class for the first time, and then striving to make it better.  Further, I have gained transferable quantitative and qualitative research skills as well as proficiency in technologies for communication and collaboration.

My undergraduate degree from Georgetown University is in Japanese, and my first out-of-school job as an admissions coordinator for an English language school brought me to the field of education.  I spent a year teaching English in Japan and then returned to the United States to earn a Master's degree at Stanford University in International Comparative Education.  

In my monograph, Japanese Students in American Higher Education: A Cross-cultural Analysis of Academic Culture, I sought to identify and define the cultural differences between the academic experiences in the two countries, based on interviews with Japanese college students in this country.  During my studies I also held an internship at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, doing research for a revision of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education.

Upon graduation, I worked on two separate projects at the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching at Stanford.  The first was a multi-level study looking at the intersection of federal, state, and district policy on teaching and learning for the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy.  As a member of the district policy team and using qualitative and quantitative analysis, I helped construct a framework to understand the different functions of a district.  The second project was a documentation initiative that looked at the evolution of public-private collaboration for large-scale district improvement.  

After personal time taken around the arrival of my two children, I started doing consulting work, taking full advantage of technologies such as iChat, wikis, and Google Documents to collaborate with colleagues from a home office.  My current project is at the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International.  I supported several online seminars on the use of interactive technologies in teaching, by designing online evaluation surveys and analyzing and writing up the results for reports to funders.  I am in the midst of devising a coding scheme to analyze discussion transcripts for a paper on online instructor-participant interactions.  I have also helped re-write a training manual for the OpenEye Management Group, improving readability of text and graphics.

My professional interests also include early childhood education, and I am taking child development classes at Foothill College.

See my resume for a .pdf version in traditional resume format.