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Nancy Pine has had a rich career in educational experiences. She joined the Mount St. Mary’s College faculty in 1995 as director of the Elementary Education Program and now directs the Bridging Cultures: US/China Program that provides means for students, staff, and faculty to learn more about China. At the university level she has specialized in teaching courses in language and literacy, theory and practice, and nonverbal communication. In addition she has taught teacher research courses that produced three monographs of undergraduate and graduate student research and led a service learning project that included faculty and MSMC alumni.

Dr. Pine holds California credentials for both high school and elementary teaching, and has taught in a variety of venues, including 10 years in primary grade bilingual classes in the Pasadena Unified School District where she piloted programs in process writing, the use of emergent literacy as a foundation for young children's reading and writing development, and hands-on, inquiry math learning. She also developed methods for teachers to conduct research on their classroom effectiveness.

After teaching in the public schools, Nancy Pine returned to graduate school for a Ph.D., and wrote an award-winning dissertation on the prewriting of young children in China and the United States. At the same time she coordinated the Voices from the Inside Project at the Claremont Graduate University that involved students, faculty, staff and parents from four schools identifying the problems of schooling and seeking solutions for them. With teachers in the project she gave numerous invited presentations nationally and the report for the project sold over 80,000 copies.

Always curious about learning perspectives in different cultures, her research has investigated cultural mismatches, the looking behavior of young children in the United States and China, how Chinese primary school children learn to write characters, questioning strategies used by classroom teachers, and the ways by which teachers in Chinese villages adapt to curriculum changes.

Dr. Pine has presented papers internationally in England, France, Australia, Canada, Japan and many parts of China as well as at conferences throughout the United States. At present she is writing a book that compares Chinese and U.S. education and identifies what the two countries can learn from each other. She and her Beijing research colleague are writing an invited chapter on the history of early literacy development in China. Recent awards have been Honorary Professor at Fushun Teachers' College in northeastern China, Honorary Citizen of AnShang Village in Shaanxi Province in central China, and a Certificate of Appreciation from the City of Los Angeles for work with the Los Angeles/Guangzhou Sister City Organization.

Dr. Pine is a member of the steering committee of the Literacy Research Association International Committee and of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) and the Association of Childhood Education International. She is also on the governing board of the Altadena Christian Children's Center.

Representative Papers

(PDF files for most papers are at http://nancypine.com )

            Pine, N. & Yu, Z-Y. (Invited chapter, in review) The history of early childhood literacy in China

            Yu, Z-Y & Pine, N. 2008. Discourse strategies in early childhood book-related activities in China. National Reading Conference, Orlando, FL, December 2008.

            Yu, Z-Y & Pine, N. 2007. Primary grade literacy development in two Chinese villages. National Reading Conference, Austin, TX, December 2007.

            Pine, N. 2007 A micro-analysis of looking behavior of an English-speaking and a Chinese-speaking child. In LACUS Forum XXXIII: Variability. Eds. P. Reich, W. J. Sullivan, A. R. Lommel. Texas, Houston: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.

            Yu, Z-Y & Pine, N. 2006. Strategies for enhancing emergent literacy in Chinese preschools. National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, December 2006.

            Pine, N. 2005. Visual information-seeking behavior of Chinese- and English-speaking children. In LACUS Forum XXXI: Interconnections. Eds. A. Makkai, W. J. Sullivan, A. R. Lommel. Houston, TX: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.

            Pine, N., Huang P-A, Huang, R-S. 2003. Decoding strategies used by Chinese primary school children. Journal of Literacy Research, 35 (2): 777-812.

            Pine, N. 2001. The complexity of beginnings. In J. Addison-Jacobsen & D. Hill (Eds.), Struggling toward service learning solutions. Stanford, CA: Service Learning 2000 Center, Stanford University.

            Regan, J., Pine, N., & Stephenson, J. 2000. Attention to microspace: Plotting the connections of a cultural theme. In D. G. Lockwood, P. H. Fries, & J. E. Copeland (Eds.), Functional approaches to language, culture and cognition. (Amsterdam studies in theory and history of linguistic science, Series IV). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

            Pine, N., Huang, R-S., Huang, P-A., Zhang, W-J. 1999. Learning strategies of children who know Chinese. In Dreyer, P. (ed.) Yearbook of the Claremont Reading Conference, Claremont, CA

            Pine, N. & Zhang, Y. 1999. Intercultural reality and a multiethnic vision. New Era in Education, 80 (1): 2-7. (Journal of the World Education Fellowship.)

            Pine, N. (Ed.) 1998. From personal stories to research questions. Teacher Research Series. Los Angeles: Mount St. Mary's College.

            Pine, N. (Ed.) 1997. Journeys of reflective practice. Teacher Research Series. Los Angeles: Mount St. Mary’s College.

            Pine, N. 1994. The central role of teachers, students and parents: Participatory research in multiethnic school communities. New Era for Education 75(3): 78-84. (Journal of the World Education Fellowship.)

            Pine, N. (Ed.) 1994. Participatory research: Digging deeper into classroom realities. Teacher Research Series. Claremont, CA: Institute for Education in Transformation, The Claremont Graduate School.

            Stephenson, J., Pine, N., Zhang, L-W., & Xie, J. 1993. Some gestures commonly used in Nanjing, PRC. Semiotica 95(3/4):235-59.

            Pine, N. 1992. Three personal theories that suggest models for teacher research. Teachers College Record 93(4):656-72.

Representative Conference Presentations and Lectures

            A new theory of the structure and flow of language development. Faculty and graduate student lecture, Nanjing University, School of Foreign Studies, Jiangsu Province, China. April 2010.

            Pedagogical Traditions in Modern Chinese Classrooms. Pine, N. & Beltramo, J. CEIS (Comparative and International Education Society) Western Conference, University of California, Los Angeles. November 2009.

            Learning to speak English in a sea of Chinese and American education: Primary school through college (Learning independent thinking) Lecture series, Yan'an University, Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, China. October 2008.

            Interactive teaching of oral English. Address to faculty and student body plus workshops for faculty, Fushun Teachers' College, Fushun, China. April 2008

            Primary grade literacy development in two Chinese villages. Poster presented with Zhenyou Yu, from China Women’s University. National Reading Conference, Austin, Texas. December 2007.

            Edging toward understanding: Uncovering cultural mismatches. Graduate Humanities Masters Course, Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles. September 2007.

            Culturally delineated skills of looking behavior of young Chinese children. Across Regions and Cultures Symposium, Society for Research in Child Development Conference, Boston. April 2007.

            Changing pre-literacy opportunities in China. Poster presented with Zhenyou Yu, from China Women’s University. National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, California. December 2006.

            A micro-analysis of looking behavior of an English-speaking and a Chinese-speaking child. The 33rd Forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, Toronto, Canada. 2006.

            Pre-Literacy Development in China. Poster Session and associated paper, International Committee Presentation, National Reading Conference, Miami, Florida. December, 2005,

            Does language shape thought? New research on linguistic relativity and the Whorfian hypothesis. Faculty and graduate student seminar, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. October 2004.

            Literacy learning in the Chinese primary grades. Poster Session and associated paper, International Committee Presentation, National Reading Conference, December 2004, San Antonio, Texas.

            Children's visual information-seeking behavior in two cultures. The 31st Forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, Chicago, 2004.

            Analyzing intercultural communication rifts using the Peircean Triangle, Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Lyon, France, 2004

            New developments in cognitive science and neuroscience. Nanjing University, Foreign Languages Department, Nanjing, China, for graduate students and faculty. 2001.

            Current theoretical influences in Western education, lecture to students and faculty of Education Research College of Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China. 2000

            Professional expectations in the West, lecture to 3rd and 4th year undergraduates, Xi’an Translators College, Xi’an, China. 2000

            Linking community voices and schools with service learning, with Debbie DePuy Giunta, Gloria Ramos, and two third-grade students from Winter Gardens Elementary School. National Coalition of Education Activists Conference, Los Angeles, CA. 2000.

            Mismatches in cultural communication, with Zhang Yafei, Communications Institute, Nanjing. Lecture to Nanjing University faculty and graduate students, China. 1999.

            Understanding cultural mismatches: Tools for teacher-student intercultural communication, International Conference of the World Education Federation, Tasmania, Australia. 1999.

            No hunger for memories: Tales of learning English in bilingual and immersion classrooms, with Mount St. Mary's College students and graduates, Conference of the California Association of Bilingual Educators, Los Angeles. 1998.

            Activity theory and its relation to sociolinguistics. Faculty and graduate student lecture, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, China. 1998.

            Visual information seeking behavior in two cultures. Pacific and Asian Communication Association Conference, Honolulu. 1997.

            Cultural disequilibrium: A lens for comparative international research, with Zhang Yafei. Conference on Ethnographic Inquiry and Qualitative Research in a Postmodern Age. Sponsored by the University of Southern California, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Irvine. 1997.

            Commencement speaker. Professional Development Academies, Pasadena Unified School District, Pasadena, CA. 1996.

            An analytical path into observational data. Education Colloquium, Center for Educational Studies, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA. 1996

            Communicating across traditional barriers. Keynote address. Family-School-Community Partnerships Conference and Workshop. Sponsored by Compensatory Education, Migrant Education, American Indian Education Offices, California Department of Education. 1994.

            Co-presenter of seminar series to model interactive learning, using the topic of cultural rule-learning. Hebei Mechanico-Electrico Engineering College, Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China. 1994.

            Observational data related to the visual semiotic: U.S. and Chinese perspectives. Jiaotong Xi'an University research seminar, Xi'an, People's Republic of China. 1994.

                        The central role of teachers, students and parents: Participatory research in multiethnic school communities. World Education Fellowship, 37th Biennial International Conference, Tokyo. 1994.