Stan Goto began his tenure as a Teachers College Minority Postdoctoral Fellow in January of 1999. Goto came to the College from California, where he received his B.A. in English, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Education at the University of California at Berkeley.

Goto is interested in looking at teaching in community colleges. Working in the English Education program in the Department of Arts and Humanities, Goto is researching the History of Remedial Education and is looking at developments in pedagogy and administration in the field of remedial writing.

California, he said, has also undergone similar changes that CUNY is going through in phasing out remediation and changing admission policies. His interest in community colleges, however, is a personal thing. "Community college was there for me at just the right time," Goto said.

While at Berkeley, Goto studied teaching and learning in basic writing classes at a community college. While the classes officially only expected the students to reach text-related goals, Goto found that the instructors recognized that there were many unofficial goals to attend to, which often included socializing the students to the college classroom.

In the fall, Goto taught a course on college-level English instruction. "Most [of the students] are practicing English instructors at colleges. That gives me some connection to classroom life."

Goto's original career goals included teaching freshman English and doing research, but he says, since coming to Teachers College, he is beginning to enjoy teacher education. As time goes on, Goto sees himself being part of a research university, continuing to study theory and conducting research in the teaching and administration of English.

Marc Chun

Also from California, Marc Chun comes to TC from Stanford University where he earned his Ph.D. in Education. His dissertation, When Social Worlds Collide: Boundary Politics in the Production of Knowledge, looked at what is considered important knowledge and how it varies based on where it happens. "I looked at a university, a firm and an activist group doing the same kind of work," Chun explained. "The university was doing work for truth, the firm for profit, and the activist group for change." He wanted to know how knowledge varies based on their different goals.

Chun found that the way each group views knowledge is actually quite similar. "More frequently at universities faculty members have to get patents to get tenure and people from companies are publishing in academic journals," Chun noted. He found that as we enter the information age, there is more trading back and forth between the different social worlds than there was in the past.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Teachers College, Chun wants to expand on this work and show how these groups differ.

"This interests me in a practical way because of the fact of the information economy," Chun said. "It is interesting to think about the ramifications." For instance, Chun wonders what it means to have more players on the playing field doing the same kind of work that has always been the sole responsibility of the university.

Chun is working in the Department of Human Development in the Sociology and Education program, while at TC. He applied for the fellowship because "TC is one of those unique cases of an educational school immersed in an urban environment." Chun aspires in the future to join the faculty of a university.

Published Tuesday, Sep. 18, 2001