I think of teaching as a process. For me, the three most crucial activities of this process have been the teaching of service courses, the integration of research and instruction, and the development of curriculum. While each has a different function, they represent together a commitment to a broad definition of teaching and ultimately serve a common purpose. During my years of teaching in the Ethnic Studies Department, I have had the rare opportunity of participating in these activities and relating them organically to each other.

Teaching service courses is enormously demanding, especially when students have little background (and sometimes no interest) in history, and have only limited time to devote to the course. Moreover, many of them lack the writing skills required to express ideas and information effectively.

In order to address this wide range of problems, I had to go beyond the presentation of interesting and problem-solving lectures. I had to involve the students directly in the problem-solving process, encouraging them (even in large lectures) to engage in a dialogue with me in class. By "dialogue," I do not mean a situation in which students ask their professor questions; rather I mean a process in which we are both posing questions and pursuing answers together.

The graduate student instructors and I met on a regular basis to discuss problems in sections, to plan section discussions, and to come up with imaginative ideas and innovations. This open-ended process led to the use of drama presentations, conceptualized and performed by the students, to illustrate and explain certain historical developments and their relationship to contemporary issues.

I also saw my service courses as a way to help Asian American students improve their writing skills—skills indispensable for both their intellectual and personal growth. Thus, I gave considerable attention to writing and held writing workshops, using the Socratic method to discuss different writing problems and techniques. This emphasis on writing skills enabled students to treat learning as the interrelationship of thinking, expression, and subject content.

One of the critical problems I had to face and still have to face, although to a somewhat lesser degree, was the lack of curriculum materials—scholarly books in ethnic studies, a new field of academic inquiry.

To develop lectures, I found myself doing original research in archives at the Bancroft Library, the Library of Congress, and other institutions. I also began traveling far away from my discipline—history—and doing theoretical readings in literary criticism, psychology, economics, philosophy, and sociology, for new theoretical constructs were required to conceptualize a comparative analysis of race relations in American society. I shared my archival research with my students and tried out my ideas in lectures, asking them to critique my hypotheses.

The integration of research and teaching has been for me a two-way process. Not only have I involved students in my research and related my research to my teaching; I have also participated in and learned much from student research projects, particularly projects by undergraduates. I think undergraduate students are capable of doing original research, and I have always encouraged them to participate in the advancement of knowledge.

My interest in teaching and research springs from a fundamental concern for the quality of our society, particularly in the area of race relations. As I study the history of race in America, read about recent events, and reflect on the demographic projections for California, I realize our urgent need to deepen as well as extend our understanding of one of America's most vexatious issues. Teaching, for me, is a process that speaks to this need, this issue.

Revised: 1993