About Nancy Pine
Author
My Story
Both Nancy Pine and An Wei grew up eating food their families grew outside their rural homes – raspberries for Nancy in her New Jersey cabin and millet for An Wei in his home in rural China. Something in common, yes, but the young Quaker girl also had indoor plumbing, not to mention paper and pencils. For An Wei to learn Chinese characters, he used a stick and the mud outside his door.
After college, Nancy’s first job involved arranging for American high school students to dive into other cultures abroad. When she became a teacher, her goal was always to empower her students with knowledge of other cultures – it was a natural step for her to learn Spanish and become a bilingual first grade teacher in Pasadena and then, after a mid-career Ph.D., to run a teacher preparation program for U.S. students, mostly native Spanish speakers.
(And, if you happen to have a spare two or three hours, ask her about how California short-changed its bilingual education program and what it should have done.)
Her search for the seeds of how kids learn to read and write took her to China to look at the differences between Chinese and American education – the point of her book Educating Young Giants is to explain both countries’ systems – what’s missing, and what each could do to improve and help each other.
What began Nancy’s research on An Wei was simply the marvel that a dirt-poor peasant could end up interpreting for an American president. Her curiosity led her to volunteer to teach English in An Wei’s village, even as he was fighting local corruption that undermined the village school. Fifteen years later, One in a Billion is the result.
The Covid epidemic turned Nancy and two friends – one African-American, one Japanese-American and she herself, European-American – into how they were drawn together despite radically different life beginnings and experiences.
Now, she is writing a book that explores her memorable decades of consulting and doing research in China. What shape will this in-depth exploration take? She doesn’t yet know, but meanwhile she’s definitely available to tell you all about what she does know about modern China and life in a poor farmer’s village.
Nancy Pine holds a PhD in education and has traveled and studied in rural China for decades. She is a respected authority on Chinese and American early childhood education.
Nancy Pine
Media Bio
Nancy Pine has travelled and studied in China for decades. She holds a PhD in education and is a respected authority on Chinese and American early childhood education, which led to her book, Educating Young Giants, published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has taught everything from kindergarten to graduate school and founded the Bridging Cultures US/China Program. At Mount Saint Mary’s University, she has advised the administration and faculty on China.
Nancy Pine gives talks nationally and internationally and has won numerous awards including a City of Los Angeles honor for her cross-cultural activities. Her current book, One in a Billion: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey in Modern-Day China, carries the reader into the heart-wrenching, and ultimately uplifting story of one outspoken man that illuminates the timeless narrative of a billion ordinary Chinese citizens.
Nancy’s Books
Educating Young Giants: What Kids Learn
(And Don’t Learn) in China and America
Educating Young Giants carries readers into Chinese and American elementary and high school classrooms, and highlights the big differences between schooling in China and the United States. Nancy Pine reveals how these two countries need to extract themselves from outmoded practice and learn from each other’s strengths.
I wish I had read Nancy Pine’s Educating Young Giants, What Kids Learn (and Don’t learn) in China and America before I went to China in 2007! It’s a thoughtful and thorough account that starts with classrooms in both nations that come alive in her telling. She has a familiarity with both, and a breadth in both, that makes her efforts to draw from them very credible. And she’s a good storyteller.
—Deborah Meier, Senior Scholar, New York University Steinhardt School of Education, and MacArthur Fellow
This useful comparison of primary education in China and the U.S. is a must-read for anyone involved with educational reform and assessment. Dr. Pine offers a well-documented, thorough, unbiased, and up-to-date report. Challenging current educational reforms to be more responsive to rapid changes around us, she provides insightful observations that should lead the way.
– Alice S. Huang, California Institute of Technology
中美基础教育大碰撞
中美两国在对待数学教育的态度和方式上有什么差异？教师的角色和任务有何不同？课堂教育是强调学生对于课本的深入理解还是侧重学生本身的独立思考？两国教育对勤奋和天赋的强调有何差异？学业和考试压力的不同在哪里？两国语言对学习的潜在影响是什么？教学环境与纪律的设定有何不同？大学入学的竞争差异在哪里？
作为资深教育专家，作者在二十年的时间里往来中美之间数十次，走访旁听了两国各地多所学校的课堂教育，与老师、教育者、家长、孩子们进行了广泛的交流。在本书中，她忠实记录了自己在两国课堂旁听的所观所感，充满了生动的细节描述。难能可贵的是，作者在差异比较中尽量保持了客观与公正，尽可能全面和深入地分析了中美两国的教育者、决策人和父母在教育实施中各自的优点和缺点。