"I think Joanne is a marvelous soul and I supported her application for the teaching position wholeheartedly and was just thrilled that she got it," said Professor of English Kim Townsend. "She's an enthusiastic learner and will be a splendid teacher."
Traveling to Taiwan
Wang will put her English major to good use by assisting English teachers in a rural Taiwanese elementary school. She will spend 20 hours per week teaching and 15 hours helping to plan the English teaching curriculum.
Wang describes her location as a small town. "You can use a bicycle to get around, so there will probably be a lot of opportunities to get to know the locals," she said.
A Long Island native, Wang hopes to explore her family's cultural heritage. "My parents grew up in Taiwan and my grandparents still live there now. I also wanted to improve my Chinese, and this seemed like the best way to do it," she said. "I'm looking forward to teaching in Taiwan because I think that it will be an opportunity to experience a new culture that will resonate with me in some ways but will also teach me new things about myself and the educational systems."
Wang has accompanied her family to Taiwan approximately every four years, but has not made a trip there since the summer of 2000. "I look forward to everything except the humidity," she joked.
A committed teacher
Wang has shown a true commitment to teaching during the past four years with her time at El Arco Iris, a Holyoke-based after-school program for underprivileged neighborhood children. "I saw a poster my freshman year and it looked like something I'd be interested in," said Wang. "El Arco Iris is an arts-education and tutoring program that works with elementary to high school students. Most of the kids live in the apartment complexes right across the street from the building."
Following her sophomore year, Wang spent an additional summer with El Arco Iris, where she helped plan and direct activities for the kids. She interacted more with the community by participating in youth board meetings and assisting with an arts walk along the canals in Holyoke. "I've learned a lot from the experience, especially by watching the director, since he knows his community. His own kids are in the school system, so he really knows how to engage the kids and he understands their home situations," said Wang. "That really taught me the importance of local community members in improving schools. I can't just walk in and change things-we need to learn from other people."
Wang explained that most of the students she worked with in Holyoke were Hispanic. "So even there I got a different cultural experience which helped me to see how culture affects education," she said.
Wang had spent the previous summer working with autistic children in an after-school program on Long Island. "It was a very different type of teaching," said Wang. "You learn patience and persistence. The kids in this program were severely autistic and some would become violent, so it was quite difficult. I enjoyed it very much though."
Wang continued teaching even during a semester abroad in Madrid, Spain during her junior year through a course she took called the Modern Social Conscience of Spain. One component of the course was an internship and, true to form, Wang opted to work with children through a Red Cross program. "There were large numbers of immigrants in the area in which I was working," said Wang. "Immigration is a recent phenomenon in Spain-it has increased tremendously within the last five years, so the government is trying to find ways to incorporate these new immigrants into the system."
Teaching in Spain was different from America at first. "[The Spanish] are more physical with students: they'll pick up their students and take them out of their room or raise their voices at them," said Wang. "There were just different cultural norms that I had to get used to. Whether or not I agreed with them, I found it helpful to compare the methods."
Another teaching-related activity toward which Wang has shown active commitment is leading small groups for the Amherst Christian Fellowship, which she has done for the past three years. "This year David Golann ['04] and I are leading one on Old Testament narratives. Leading it is wonderful," said Wang. "I enjoy the preparation and the studying that it requires. It's a more intimate setting and it's a great time to better understand my peers and how they think of their spirituality."
"I think all of Joanne's friends know that she is going to be an excellent teacher," said Golann. "Her commitment to teaching ... has been extraordinary. She is quiet and understanding, but can be tough as well; I pity the student who comes to class without his or her homework."
Virginia Woolf
Like many other Amherst seniors, Wang has spent the last year hard at work on her senior honors project. "I studied Virginia Woolf and her fictional biographies," said Wang. "We don't really think of Woolf as a biographer, so I thought it would be interesting to see how she addresses questions of how we portray life and what character consists of."
Wang first became interested in Woolf during a Modern British Fiction course that she took with Professor of English William Pritchard, who eventually became her thesis advisor. "We read 'To the Lighthouse' during the course and it was wonderful," explained Wang. "It was the first book I'd ever read that helped me to understand myself better. Woolf articulated feelings that I'd experienced but that I'd never been able to express myself."
"[When Wang began writing about Woolf,] it was not yet clear what sort of things she would do because Virginia Woolf is very heavily written about, especially her best novels," said Pritchard. "[I] told Joanne that she should try to figure out something different and she did manage to do something very different and even original," he said. "It was a very nice piece of writing and she showed lots of independence and spirit doing this more or less on her own."
Wang is effusive in her praise of Woolf. "[Woolf] is wonderful because she has five volumes of diaries, five volumes of letters and hundreds of essays and shorts pieces," said Wang. "Just perusing through her work was a valuable experience. She confronts the assumptions of how life is written by previous novelists-generally male novelists. They believed that we all live sequential existences-a linear development-whereas both [Woolf] believed, and I believe, that we live more by impressions that we receive."
Wang had a very positive experience writing her thesis. "I think that everyone should write a thesis," she said. "It teaches you to be organized, to understand a novel in its context and to do research, which is an essential skill when you leave Amherst."
Endless possibilities
Wang laughingly confessed that she is still unsure about what direction her future will take after her year in Taiwan. She has deferred her acceptance into the Teach for America program, although she might still take that route after she returns from Taiwan. "I might do [Teach for America] to get more classroom experience before going into a graduate school social policy program," said Wang. "I'm not interested in teaching long term, but I'm still interested in education. I may eventually go into educational reform. My roommates joke that I change my plan every two weeks, but I think my work will either be in education or immigration."
Despite her wealth of teaching experience, working with a class is not Wang's passion. "I think I work well one-on-one with students but in terms of being in front of my class, it's not my thing," said Wang. "Being a teacher has a lot to do with classroom management and I think I'd like to focus on individuals. I think it's difficult when you're responsible for, let's say, 100 students. It's hard to see your ideals in action."
The possibility of working in immigration is a very real one. "Part of the reason that I chose Taiwan [for my work next year] is that, being Asian-American myself, I thought that it would be good to get another perspective," said Wang. "I think it would be fascinating to study parent-child relations among immigrants, which ties back to education. I think this experience [in Taiwan] will help me to discern whether I'm interested more in education or more into Asian issues."
Wang's conclusion to her Fulbright application reflected on her expectations regarding the future. "In the future, I would like to teach and write, and I need experience and understanding to do these things well," she wrote. "Through this teaching assistantship, I hope to see, smell, taste, think and feel things that challenge my assumptions and widen my horizons." She has certainly shown a willingness to widen her horizons during the past four years and will no doubt continue to do so in Taiwan and beyond.