UMass Boston Education Professor Peter N. Kiang to Receive Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at 2007 Commencement
An educator beloved for his compassionate teaching style and a recognized advocate for equity and inclusion in the classroom, Peter Kiang, professor of education and director of the Asian American Studies Program, will receive the 2007 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Massachusetts Boston’s commencement exercises, to be held on campus Friday, June 1 at 10:00 a.m.
Kiang, a resident of Jamaica Plain, has taught at UMass Boston since 1987 and is renowned for his ability to make the curriculum come alive, and empower students to challenge their thinking. He is appointed to the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Graduate College of Education.
“Peter inspired me to reach deep within and take an aspect of teaching that was truly a passion or interest of mine and just soar with it,” wrote one former education student who now teaches in an urban high school. “Peter really wanted me to stretch my mind and connect with my students.”
The honor means a lot to Kiang because he believes it recognizes his students and their communities – whom supporters say are always Kiang’s main focus. “As an educator Dr. Kiang is tenacious,” wrote another former student.
“The students I work with are predominantly Asian, immigrant and refugee students who have struggled a lot just to be in college in the first place,” Kiang said. “The work that we’ve done together in Asian American Studies I think is remarkable and very inspiring.”
“Peter Kiang is a legend in the field” of Asian American studies, according to one colleague. It’s a role Kiang takes very seriously, having grown up with no educators equipped to help him learn about his own Asian roots. Born in Boston with a Chinese immigrant father and Scottish-American mother, Kiang’s middle name, Nien-chu, means “honor your ancestors” in Chinese -- an expectation, Kiang said, “I’ve tried to live up to.”
“All of the learning I wanted to do about Asian American studies I had to do on my own,” said Kiang, who taught his first class on the subject shortly after graduating college. “I could see just from the little that I knew what impact Asian American studies could have on others. I decided pretty early on this is powerful and there are not a lot of people who are doing this.”
With his creativity and ability to foster independent thinking in both his students and fellow professors, Kiang has changed lives. “It would be no exaggeration to characterize professor Kiang as an educator who by his example and his mentorship awakens in students their intellectual capacity and infuses within them their ability to effect change,” wrote one colleague. “He is a teacher for life, a profoundly spiritual guide,” said the colleague, who calls Kiang one of her mentors. “He is the model I strive to emulate in my own teaching.”
As a teacher, Kiang sees his role as encouraging students to come up with their own voice and vision, as well as consider what impact they want to have within their families, communities, and the larger society. “If we provide an environment where students can really be themselves and not be limited by all the structural barriers in all of our lives, they can do such powerful things,” Kiang said.
He is also a professor who believes in creating partnerships with other disciplines both within and outside of the university. “Through the service-learning projects he sets up within his courses so that students can work with the Asian American community and K-12 classrooms, he shows students the intimate relationship between thinking and doing, between studying and living,” wrote another colleague.
In the early 1990s, Kiang co-founded the Coalition for Asian Pacific American Youth, the Institute for Asian American Studies, and the Center for Immigrant & Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment, all at UMass Boston. He currently serves as co-president of the Chinese Historical Society of New England and chair of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights.
A prolific educator and scholar, Kiang has taught nine different undergraduate and graduate courses, including Teacher Research, Boston’s Asian American Communities, and Race, Class and Gender in Education Reform and Asians in the United States. Kiang is currently working on a grant-funded research project with other Asian American Studies and Education faculty and graduate students that is analyzing the barriers Asian immigrant parents face in their engagement with the Boston public schools -- a topic close to home, given that Kiang’s 13-year old son, Jazz, is himself a Boston public school student.
Kiang earned a B.A., Ed.M., and Ed.D. from Harvard University and is a former Community Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT.
Citation for Commencement 2007
Peter N. Kiang
Distinguished teaching is a fundamental condition of all great universities.
Professor Peter Nien-chu Kiang, esteemed colleague, through your excellence in teaching, you have made an incalculable contribution to our University’s greatness.
For twenty years, fellow UMass Boston faculty have admired your use of reflective, dialogic teaching practices; your ability to build working relationships across boundaries while advocating social justice; and “the immense richness of your pedagogical imagination.” The President of the National Association for Asian American Studies declares you “a legend in [your] field.” Your grants, awards, honors, and involvements are both tremendously impressive and lengthy.
But perhaps the most compelling evidence of your talents, character, and achievements comes from your students, who warmly and readily recall life-changing experiences in the many different courses you have offered throughout the years. They uniformly describe the power of your compassion and respect for the human dignity of each person in the room, and your role as both fellow explorer and gifted guide. Your encouraging questions and thoughtful silences have inspired the most reserved students to find their voices and enabled the most able and complacent students to meet new challenges.
In the words of one student, you are a teacher who “teaches from the heart.” In so doing, you have powerfully and permanently touched the hearts and lives of your colleagues, those you mentor, students, and members of our campus and local communities. Though generations will benefit from your devotion to your profession, we honor you today with the 2007 Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.