Faculty

Kyunghwa Lee, Assistant Professor.

She received her B.A. and M.A. from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign all in Early Childhood Education. As a former kindergarten teacher in Korea, she is interested in investigating various cultural, historical constraints on children’s learning and development. Recently, she (with colleagues in Demark, England, Iceland, Japan, and Korea) has begun a crossnational study on children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to examine how teachers’ views of children’s behavior in general and teachers’ perceptions of children with ADHD in particular reflect different cultural beliefs about the range of normality in child development and about proper pedagogy for young children. Her research and teaching focus on (a) promoting early childhood teachers’ awareness of how their curricula and pedagogical practices are constrained by their cultural values and beliefs and (b) exploring, with prospective and practicing teachers, ways to understand and incorporate local knowledge and resources that children bring to school in instruction.

Lee, K., & Walsh, D. J. (2005). Independence and community: Teaching Midwestern. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 26, 59-77.

Manning, M. S., & Lee, K. (2005). “In the beginning I thought it was all play”: Parents’ perceptions of the project approach in a second-grade classroom. The School Community Journal, 15(2), 7-20.

Lee, K. (2004). Rethinking the discourse on ADHD: Implications for early childhood teacher education. Illinois Schools Journal, 84, 34-48.

Lee, K., & Walsh, D. J. (2004). Teaching children at-risk: An American preschool teacher’s folk psychology and folk pedagogy. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 2, 229-246.