Language Center Graduate Staff Graduations

The Language Center has been fortunate to work with Beth Dillard, Rachel Sherman Johnson and Fang (Andie) Wang for several years. These three graduate students have held multiple positions and worked on multiple projects. Andie brought expertise in traditional and non-traditional assessment, Rachel, expertise with statistics and learning abroad, and Beth, expertise with professional development and project management. They all brought a collaborative spirit, and a willingness take on new challenges. Whenever a need arose, they were always among the first we would contact, just hoping they might be available for a new project. Fortunately, they often said yes!

Please offer your congratulations to the following graduates!

Beth Dillard, PACE Communications Coordinator, will defend her dissertation this summer. She looked at instructor learning in inquiry groups, with a special focus on how “lesson study” might be modified for the needs of language instructors in higher education. In Fall 2016 she heads out to the West Coast as Assistant Professor of Second Language Acquisition in the College of Education at Western Washington University. As a language teacher educator, she will be working with graduate and undergraduate K-12 education students, preparing them to work with linguistically and culturally diverse students.

Rachel Sherman Johnson, former Assistant Coordinator and current PACE Project Researcher, is graduating this spring with a PhD in Comparative and International Development Education. She defended her dissertation, "Creative Minds Abroad: How Design Students Make Meaning of Their International Education Experiences" on April 27. She plans to pursue a career in higher education administration.

Fang (Andie) Wang, former Intercultural Competence Specialist and LPE Developer, will defend her dissertation on Chinese international graduate students' cross-cultural experiences of learning to teach using the theoretical framework of teacher identity in summer for the PhD program in Second Languages Education in the Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction. Afterwards, she will start her assistant professor (non-tenure track) position in the Department of East Asian Studies at Colby College, Maine. She will be teaching Chinese language courses and foreign language education courses in the department.