Rather than answer the question outright, please let me first tell you the most unusual "small world" story you may well ever hear. That is, I was born and reared in Bowling Green, Kentucky. As Bowling Green will always be my first home, as the city is full of my life-long friends, and as one of my daughters and her husband and my only two grandchildren live in Bowling Green, I get to Bowling Green about once a year, even from Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, where I have been serving since 1994 as International Student Advisor In fact, I spent a week in Bowling Green at the very end of September and the first part of October of 1999.
At the tender age of four, I started to Kindergarten on the campus of what then was Western Kentucky State Teachers College but what for a number of years now has been known as Western Kentucky University, and I remained in that one, three-level building throughout grade school until graduation from high school!
Because I wanted to broaden my educational horizon by going away to college, I chose to attend Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, at that time a junior college, where I earned an Associate of Arts degree in 1951. Leaving out a great deal regarding the next fifteen years, I will note that in 1969 I enrolled at Western Kentucky University as a thirty-seven-year-old junior, to complete my undergraduate degree. Though I was usually the oldest student in class, none of my classmates or my teachers ever seemed to make any issue regarding my age, and I loved every minute of the undergraduate study.
As soon as I completed the undergraduate work, I began working on a string of graduate Degrees at Western: Humanities, then English, then a Specialist Degree in College English Teaching. I laughingly said that I was "dying by degrees"!
Once I earned the Humanities Master's, I began teaching in the Department of English at Western Kentucky University and continued to do so for the next nine years, before leaving Bowling Green in 1985 to teach in China as a "foreign expert" for three years--first in Shanghai and later in Beijing.
In 1988, in the People's Republic of China, I designed a two-part educational survey research instrument, which was administered to more than 500 men and women studying English in 15 colleges or universities throughout China. One part consisted of an open-ended questionnaire regarding student attitudes toward English language learning and teaching, and the other part consisted of a values survey that had been designed and published in 1987 by the Chinese Culture Connection ("Chinese values and the search for culture-free dimensions of culture," in The Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 18(2), 143-164).
Subsequently, I used the results of that original study as a basis for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin (1991): "Chinese students' cultural values and their attitudes toward English-language learning and teaching." In the intervening years, with the help of cooperating colleagues, I have replicated the study in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and India, and I repeated the study in China five years after the initial study.
Though the group of cooperating colleagues who developed the survey which the Chinese Culture Connection reported on in 1987 had distributed it widely, they distributed it only to 50 men and 50 women in only one college or university in 22 countries in the late 1980s, and they analyzed their data only at the "culture" level.
My unique contribution came in using that same instrument but administering it cross-sectionally to more than 500 men and women in 15 different colleges or universities all over China and later to a like number cross-sectionally all over Japan and five years later a second time around throughout China, before moving on to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and India--analyzing data not only at the "culture" level but also according to demographics of gender, age, and major field of study.
Another unique aspect of my study has been that these same hundreds of students who have responded to the cultural values survey throughout great parts of Asia since 1988 have also completed the dual-language questionnaire I designed regarding student attitudes toward the study of English in their respective countries.
After beginning the systematic study of college students' cultural values in China in 1988, I left Beijing to take up Ph.D. studies in the Foreign Language Education Center (FLEC) at the University of Texas at Austin. Upon my graduation in 1991, I went to Japan as Professor of English at Seinan Jo Gakuin Junior College for Women, in Kitakyushu, Japan, to teach for the next three years. Upon returning to the U.S. from Japan, I accepted my current position as International Student Advisor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Baylor has more than 13,000 students enrolled, of whom approximately 375 are international students from nearly 65 countries. Though I am not in an English classroom in my current position, I have been privileged to remain active in Teachers of English as a Second, or Foreign, Language International (TESOL) as well as in the Association of International Educators (NAFSA), and I have continued my research into cultural values and student attitudes toward English-language study. Over the past ten years, with the cooperation of friendly colleagues, I have collected and analyzed extensive cross-cultural and cross-sectional data from China (five years after the initial study in China), from Japan, from Taiwan, from Hong Kong, and from India. Additionally, I have data in hand from Macao and from Singapore which I have not yet had opportunity to analyze.
Recently, having learned of my work, Dr. Rozina wrote me of her wish to carry out a study similar to mine in Russia and elsewhere, via telecommunications. She tells me that one of her cooperating colleagues in the United States is Dr. Ron Eckard, of the Department of English at Western Kentucky University, my own university, in Bowling Green, where Dr. Eckard and I were colleagues before I went abroad to teach, and that she was in Bowling Green visiting the campus of the University last October when I was also in Bowling Green, but neither of us knew about the other at the time!
Dr. Rozina tells me of her plans to design a dual-language (Russian/English) Website with text materials and database on which data can be both received and disseminated. Not only am I honored by Dr. Rozina's interest in my work but also I am intrigued by the possibilities which technology offers in 2000 for cross-cultural cooperative educational research that were not available to me and my colleagues earlier. Because I find Dr. Rozina's project very promising, I have consented to write this brief biographical sketch.
Given the brief outline of my life and work to this point, you still may be wondering, "What about Socrates? Was he an Athenian or a Greek?"
"I am not an Athenian or a Greek," he writes; "I am a citizen of the world."
In truth, Socrates was an Athenian AND a Greek AND a citizen of the world.
Just so is each person on earth both a unique individual and a member of some larger group. Just so is each student a unique individual and a member of some larger group. No single study--no battery of tests--can ever reveal "all about" any person or any group of people.
How, then, can we ever know what is truly important to another person or to another group of people?
We can't know unless we ask. Even then, we can't know unless we listen respectfully to the answers. Thus, there must be friendly interaction between students and teachers, friendly interaction in an atmosphere of mutual understanding and mutual respect. Wise teachers and wise administrators would do well not only to teach their students, but also to allow themselves to learn from their students, through the asking of genuine questions and the listening respectfully to their students' answers. With this kind of respectful and interactive learning and teaching, all of us can aim to become citizens of the world like Socrates!
"Was Socrates an Athenian or a Greek?"