Faculty Development Plan
Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages
2004
A. Self-Assessment
As a new faculty member, I have brought with me a love of teaching that began in my youth and continued through posts at several colleges and universities in California and Taiwan. I enjoy the challenge of planning new courses and improving courses I have previously taught. I am attentive to students’ learning and progress and actively solicit their comments and feedback, which I then use to redesign courses. During my tenure at the University of California, Davis, I came to better appreciate the importance of using new instructional technologies including on-line resources and PowerPoint presentations to help facilitate student learning. Structure, planning and organization are important to me, and this has led me to establish specific course objectives and a unit structure around which I center my syllabi, classroom activities, assignments and tests. Since coming to BYU, I have learned that structure must be tempered with sufficient flexibility to allow for changes in pace, teaching methods and content of a course as needed when a course is in progress. My aim is to provide students with an optimal learning experience in which they play an active role through classroom activities, discussions and oral presentations. Based on the comments I have received thus far, students appreciate the structure and the rigor of my classes and feel that they leave my classroom having truly learned something.
My commitment to citizenship activities extends back to my years in graduate school, when I served as a student representative to the faculty of UCLA’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, organized a student research conference and edited a graduate student journal of Asian studies. During this same period and after, I participated actively in my local Church units in California and Taiwan and held positions of responsibility including serving twice as a counselor in a bishopric, as a ward clerk, a ward mission leader, a counselor in the Taiwan Taipei Mission presidency under two mission presidents and as a counselor in a Chinese branch presidency. I have found these activities gave me a chance to serve others, gain leadership experience and strengthen my own personal testimony. I look forward to continuing to actively participate in campus and Church organizations and service opportunities.
The area I feel most in need of improving is scholarship. While I have given numerous talks and presentations and published several articles and reviews, I have not fully developed my potential for research work. At times my attention to teaching and citizenship activities and responsibilities, which seem so much more immediate and easy to fulfill, has led me to neglect working on research projects. In order to overcome this problem, I enrolled in the “Publish and Flourish” workshop that the Faculty Center sponsored and joined a writing and research group to help make regular progress in my writing. I am hoping that I can develop an active scholarly agenda while balancing teaching and citizenship obligations.
In addition to pursuing a more active scholarly agenda, I also feel the need to increase my own knowledge of China’s traditional and modern cultures. My course load includes at least one course on Chinese culture per year, and since it has been nearly ten years since I taught such a course, I need to become current in this subject. I also hope to have an opportunity to teach a course or courses in one of my areas of specialization, visual and performing arts, and thus plan to develop a new course that would allow me to teach Chinese film and drama, which would complement BYU’s current offerings in Asian studies and the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Language’s selection of Chinese literature courses. I am already actively integrating film, television and other media materials into my classes here at BYU. My responsibility of covering Chinese prose literature from 1000 BC to the present will necessitate my becoming current in scholarship on the fields of traditional fiction and drama. Finally, I hope to slowly expand into new areas of scholarship in modern and contemporary literature and culture, including popular culture and visual arts such as photography.
B. Professional Goals
Citizenship
At present I hold two service assignments. I serve as the chair of the travel committee for the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. In this capacity I am working with the other committee member, Professor Monica Richards, and with Professor Robert Russell, our department chair, to oversee the equitable and timely allocation of travel funds in harmony with university policy. I will work to be sure that both the chair and faculty members in general are kept informed of the status of the travel budget and the disbursement of travel funds.
I also serve as faculty coordinator for the Chinese House Program for the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Language’s Chinese Section. I am working to insure that all students living in the houses are meeting the requirements for residence by carrying full loads of courses including a mandatory Chinese language course, speaking Chinese while in the house and working to create a positive learning and living environment. I have already held interviews with all of the residents during the fall semester and made biweekly visits to see that students were complying with foreign language student residence (FLSR) guidelines and that their needs were being met. This included lobbying for a DVD player for the women’s apartment. I have also strived to raise the standards for admission and carefully screened all applicants to be sure that they were fully qualified to live in the houses and would be likely to abide by all rules and guidelines. I have also tried to admit a pool of new residents with a variety of complementary language backgrounds so as to facilitate learning while fulfilling the mission of the Chinese FLSRs. I worked to help defuse tensions and successfully resolve disputes between different residents in the women’s house. My goal for 2004 is to keep the houses full, if possible, to recruit Chinese Flagship Program students to live in the Chinese Houses and increase the number of men’s apartments to two. I will continue to visit regularly, interview students and have the students over to my home once during the winter semester.
My final assignment is as the third-year Chinese language supervisor. In this capacity I help coordinate course offerings at the third year level. As a consequence of attending the Spring Seminar for New Faculty, sponsored by the Faculty Center, I have set the following citizenship goals to build connections and strengthen collegial relations with people at BYU and in my field of specialization. They include the following:
- Continue to hold weekly or biweekly writing group meetings to review research projects.
- Arrange monthly lunch meetings, dinners or other casual get-togethers with departmental colleagues. Host a dinner for faculty in Chinese or for those working on modern Asian literature.
- Have lunch at least once each month with younger faculty in literature/humanities including Nate Kramer, Daryl Lee, Anca Sprenger, Robert McFarland and Mark Burns. Consider collaborating on an interdisciplinary research symposium on a topic of common interest. Ask one or more to read something I have written and provide feedback. Have lunch with a member of campus Asian studies faculty including James Davis, Eric Hyer, Mike Farmer and Mike Murdock every two to three months. Ask about observing one of their classes and invite them to observe one of my classes. Consider having one of them guest-teach one of my classes and offer to guest-teach one of theirs. Ask one or more to read something I have written and provide feedback.
- Establish regular (biweekly to monthly) e-mail or telephone contact with two former UCLA classmates, two other leading scholars in the field and two additional up-and-coming younger scholars. By the end of March 2005, have at least half of them review one or more samples of my scholarship and/or participate jointly in proposing, putting together or giving a conference panel presentation. Actively meet at least three new people at each annual professional meeting I attend.
I have already joined the Asian Studies Committee of the Whole and am formally recognized as a member of the Asian studies faculty on campus. In the future I will apply for affiliation with the Comparative Literature Program. Both Dean Van Gessel and Associate Dean John Rosenberg felt that my research and teaching interests supported this affiliation, as does the fact that I will be team-teaching Honors 303R/Asian Studies 342/Comparative Literature 342 Asian Literary Traditions with Professor Scott Miller, a requirement for both the Asian studies and comparative literature majors. This will allow me to share my knowledge with a wider pool of students and help establish contacts with other faculty members working in literature. Given my interest in Chinese film, I am also considering volunteering to serve on the international cinema advisory board.
Teaching
Effective with the fall 2004 semester I will assume the course load of Professor Gary Williams, who will be retiring. This will involve five new preparations for the 2004-2005 academic year: Chinese 343 (Chinese Prose in Translation), Chinese 443 (Modern Chinese Literature), Chinese 444 (Contemporary Chinese Literature), Chinese 495 (Senior Seminar) and Honors 303R/Asian Studies 342/Comparative Literature 342 Asian Literary Traditions (team-taught with Professor Scott Miller). During spring and summer 2004, I will work with an assistant to prepare materials for Chinese 443 including copies of the lesson texts, glossaries, lists of literary terms, biographical data on the authors and introductory materials on literary analysis and research methodology. Readings, which will all be in Chinese, will be selected from a variety of genres (the short story, poetry, the essay and film) and will be supplemented with background readings in English and reference materials including authors’ biographical data, critical responses to and appraisals of the texts and other materials in Chinese. The course will be conducted in both English (one hour per week) and Chinese (two hours per week). Students will submit written assignments in both languages. In the future, I plan to establish a core curriculum for Chinese 443-444 that will be used each year. As with all my courses, I will revise materials annually in response to feedback from peer reviews and student evaluations and comments. I will prepare materials for Chinese 444 during the fall 2004 term following the same strategies used for Chinese 443.
In winter 2005 I will offer Chinese 344 Chinese Prose Narratives, which will survey prose writing from early historical and philosophical texts, to ghost stories and Buddhist allegories, to the rise of storytelling and the literati short story, to the great Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West, to the birth of modern fiction in the works of Lu Xun, to the modern novel and/or short story from Taiwan and China. I will draw upon course materials developed at U.C. Davis and add additional units as needed.
I will also co-teach Asian Literary Traditions with Professor Scott Miller for the first time in Winter 2005. My preparations for this course will make up the course development project portion of my Spring Seminar for New Faculty goals. Over the next few months, Professor Miller and I will decide how best to adapt the course to meet our goals and teaching styles. We will keep many of the features that have proven successful in past years. I have appended a copy of my project proposal to this document.
In order to improve my teaching effectiveness, I am planning to read several books on teaching this year. These include Peer Review of Teaching, which I hope to finish by July 25, 2004, and useful selections from Tools of Teaching, which I will finish reading by November 30, 2004. I am also planning to use midterm evaluations in all of my classes as well as conduct individual consultations with students. Finally, I may also make use of the SCOT program to get feedback from student evaluators. I will also make use of materials and resources provided by the Faculty Center to improve the design of my courses.
Beyond 2004, I am interested in proposing a new course on Chinese visual and performing arts, which will cover traditional and modern Chinese drama and transnational Chinese film in rotation. The course will be offered in English and will be listed as a general education course in order to stimulate demand for enrollment. I will continue to refine and improve the structure, content and assessment activities for Chinese 345, 443 and 444 (as well as Chinese 301 and 302 if I continue to have an opportunity to teach them) and Honors 303R/Asian Studies 342/Comparative Literature 342 Asian Literary Traditions. I will continue to develop new content for Chinese 344 that will include the following: Chinese film narratives (2006), twentieth century fiction (2007), and traditional fiction (2008). I will rotate these offerings in future years. As department and university need and student interest dictate, I have also considered developing a course on oral interpretation skills to be offered as Chinese 327. This course would complement Professor David Honey’s Chinese 327 course on written translation. Finally, I will develop senior seminar courses focusing on late imperial, modern and contemporary periods to be offered in alternate years. The first will be entitled “Utopias and Dystopias in Chinese Literature from Earliest Times to the Present,” which will be offered this fall. Future topics will include “Taiwan Literature: Fiction, Poetry and Film from 1900 to the Present.”
Scholarship
My department chair, Professor Robert Russell, and I agree that scholarship should be the primary focus of my efforts. I will begin by completing several projects in progress. This includes an entry on the early twentieth century writer Xu Dishan for the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume on Chinese fiction writers from 1900-1949. I am currently waiting for the editor to respond to my last draft and will return my revisions within two weeks of receiving any comments. I am also in the process of writing up a review of Chi Pang-yuan and David Der-wei Wang’s Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century for the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. I plan to have this sent off by July 31, 2004
I have resumed work on a partially-completed manuscript on the depiction of the White Terror in Taiwan (1950-1970) and its recovery in Chinese fiction and film. I will present portions of it as a conference talk at the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast (ASPAC) Conference to be held at the University of Oregon at Eugene, June 19, 2004. I plan to circulate the paper to colleagues on and off campus for feedback and will then submit the completed paper to the journal positions for possible publication.
During the summer term, I will spend most of my time doing research on two new projects. The first, tentatively entitled “Peach Blossom Spring Polluted: Emerging Environmental Consciousness in the Essays of Yeh Shan/Yang Mu,” will be given at the Rocky Mountain Conference of the MLA, which will be held in Boulder, CO in October 2004 as part of a panel on the environment and environmental consciousness in Chinese literature that is being organized by a colleague at Washington State University, Dr. Christopher Lupke. The paper will be based on research begun while working on my dissertation. I plan to have the paper completed by the end of August 2004. After the conference, I will revise the paper and submit it to the either Modern Chinese Literature and Culture or positions.
The second project, tentatively entitled “Remapping Taipei,” will explore the influence of Nationalism on the urban geography of Taipei through its renaming of streets in keeping with its own political agendas. This remapping illustrates some of the major thrusts of Nationalist political and cultural policy. I will also discuss how various creative writers have incorporated Taipei’s mapping into their films and poetry and thus offered a commentary on life in Taiwan under the rule of the Nationalist Party. I am planning to work on outlining and writing up this project during the fall semester. In order to get feedback on this paper, I would like to present it at several venues. I would like to first present it to the students and faculty in Asian studies at BYU. Late in the fall or early in the winter of 2005, I would like to present it to the faculty and graduate students in Chinese studies at UCLA as part of their Center for Chinese Studies/lecture series for new research by young scholars. The associate director of the Center, Richard Gunde, may be able to line something up. With feedback from these presentations in hand, I will revise the paper and submit it to the Journal of Asian studies for publication.
During the summer of 2004, I plan to travel to Taiwan to do research at the National Library, collect books and audio-visual materials, interview authors and view films at the National Film Archive. I have received funding from the Department, the College and the Kennedy Center. During the two weeks I will be in Taipei, I will focus on materials related to the “Remapping Taipei” and “The Pollution of the Peach Blossom Spring” projects I outlined above.
In order to get help and support for my writing, I participated in the BYU Faculty Center-sponsored workshop, “Publish and Flourish,” on January 15-16, 2004. During the winter semester I joined a writing support group as part of this workshop and met regularly with colleagues in English and humanities to discuss research and writing projects. My faculty mentor will also be a source of support; I plan to meet with him regularly to discuss my research projects.
As a consequence of attending the Spring Seminar for New Faculty, sponsored by the Faculty Center, I have set the following scholarship goals:
- Establish and remain in contact with the editors of at least two major journals on a quarterly basis. Offer to review manuscripts if necessary.
- Spend two research days (Tuesdays and Thursdays) each month reviewing the current contents of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, positions, CLEAR, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Tamkang Review and Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese.
- Use new PDA to set up flowchart of research projects in progress. Work to finish stages of projects by established deadlines.
- Use e-mail, telephone and conferences to brainstorm with colleagues at other schools on ideas for new projects. Aim to test this with two new ideas and contact two to three colleagues to check out each idea.
- Send out sections of two papers and/or presentations to two to three specialists in my field. Incorporate suggestions and comments in revised paper or presentation.
I plan to be meeting these goals by March 31, 2005 when my final report for the Spring Seminar is due.
My mid- to long-term goal is to incorporate these and several other papers in a monograph entitled “Culture Under Nationalism: Literature and the Visual Arts in Taiwan, 1949-1995.” Between 2005 and 2007 I plan to complete additional chapters that will be incorporated in the manuscript. It is likely that I will need to take a professional development leave or have teaching relief in the 2006-2007 or the 2007-2008 year in order to complete the book manuscript. I will consider various extramural sources of funding that could be combined with a course-load reduction or professional development leave. Additional travel to Taiwan and/or China may also be necessary to collect documentary materials, interview authors and meet with scholars of Taiwan literature.
C. Resources needed to accomplish professional goals
Research funds
Currently I receive 10 hours per week in research assistance from the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages. I have recruited a native speaker of Chinese to assist me with grading and course materials preparation, which allows me to devote more of my own time to scholarship projects. I am planning to have him start collecting Chinese-language research materials and helping me review Chinese literary texts. I have received funding from the College of Humanities for 190 hours of research funding to pay for my assistant to aid me with materials collection, textual analysis and translation review.
Travel funds
The Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages will be funding several research-related trips in 2004. I will present papers at the ASPAC (Asian studies on the Pacific Coast) annual meeting in Eugene, Oregon on June 19, 2004 and at the RMMLA (Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association) annual meeting from September 30-October 2 in Boulder, CO. I have also applied to take a fourteen-day trip to Taiwan to do research at the National Library, view films at the National Film Archive, interview authors and filmmakers and collect teaching and research materials. I have received funding from the Department, the College of Humanities and the Kennedy Center.
Equipment/software
The Department has provided me with an excellent laptop and connections to laser printing facilities. I have recently received copies of KeyTip and Chinese Key software. I hope in the future to get a copy of Endnote for building a data base of reference materials as Wenlin for reading and analyzing electronic texts in Chinese.
With department supply funds I have purchased a Palm One Tungsten T3 PDA for keeping track of names, phone numbers, appointments, class assignments, research project schedules and other data.
Supplies
The Department currently allocates $500 to each faculty member for purchasing course and research related books and other materials. I have used this money to purchase several books and a PDA as noted above. The College has also allocated $1,000 for enhancing my personal library of books (and DVDs/videos I believe) for long-term scholarship goals. I will work with John Rosenberg to prepare and submit an appropriate list. I have received a small amount of additional funds for purchasing research-related materials during my trip to Taiwan this summer.
D. Relationship between individual goals and department and university aspirations and needs
At this stage my current citizenship, teaching and scholarship goals directly support the aspirations of both the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Studies and Brigham Young University. My citizenship goals promote established A&NEL and BYU programs. My service on the travel committee furthers professional development for faculty within the department, which leads to increased scholarly activity, which benefits both the College and the University. My work with the Chinese House supports the FLSR Program and Chinese studies on campus. Community outreach helps to let those in the greater Provo area know about the importance of Asian and Chinese studies on campus and helps young students foster an early interest in these fields. I am hoping that future work with Chinese film studies will increase the University’s profile in the Asian studies community.
My teaching during the 2005-2005 academic year will focus on literature and culture courses that meet major, minor and Asian studies requirements, and thus directly support department and campus-wide programs.
My scholarship goals will help me to not only remain current in my field but also expand my knowledge of new areas of inquiry that I can then share with my students. I am hoping that my growing expertise in Chinese cinema will allow me to add course to the Chinese curriculum on Chinese film and the performing arts. It will also allow me to assist the International Cinema program on campus, which regularly screens Chinese films.
E. Activities and accomplishments so far in achieving goals
I have actively recruited students of the Chinese House program and acted as advocate for the program with FLSR office. I have recruited two apartments of men for spring and summer term. I have compiled A&NEL travel requests for 2004 for the approval of the department chair.
In keeping with student comments shared with me verbally and provided in writing on evaluations, I revised my homework assignments for and added current supplementary television and newspaper materials to the Chinese 302 course that I taught in the winter semester 2004. I also revised and improved the materials I used in my Chinese culture class.
I have already completed a review of Laikwan Pang’s Building a New China in Cinema for CLEAR (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles and Reviews). On March 19 I presented a conference paper entitled “Belief, Redemption and Liberation: Religion and the Role of Women in the Short Fiction of Xu Dishan,” at the Fifth Literature and Belief Symposium sponsored by the Center for Christian Values in Literature at BYU.
On January 15-16, I attended the “Publish and Flourish” workshop sponsored by the Faculty Center and have begun a program of daily writing and biweekly writing group meetings. I also attended the Fall Seminar for New Faculty offered by the Faculty Center. From May 3-12 I attended the Spring Seminar for New Faculty.
F. Comments on measures of success
None at this point.