Dr. Sarah Lillo Kang (she/her/hers) is passionate about fostering engaged global citizens who positively impact schools and communities. She brings over two decades of experiences as an educator, teacher educator, scholar, and equity-oriented professional to her work. Lillo Kang is especially excited about finding collaborative, responsive, and critical solutions to the challenges educators and students face in contemporary contexts.
Lillo Kang draws on an interdisciplinary training: a B.S. in Child Development, English, and Deaf Education from Vanderbilt University; a M.Ed. in English Education from Vanderbilt University; and a Ph.D. in Education: Social Sciences & Comparative International Education from the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds teaching credentials in K-12 Deaf Education and middle/secondary English.
Lillo Kang’s teaching has been incredibly varied. She has taught in everything from elementary to graduate classrooms and subjects ranging from secondary English, research methodology, and curriculum and instruction to (in)equities in schools, media literacy, and experiential pedagogies. Her teaching is informed by instructional and research experiences in classrooms in Tennessee, California, Missouri, South Korea, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Africa. She also is informed by experiences in classrooms with varied geographic contexts (e.g. urban, rural, suburban on three continents), demographic compositions (e.g. everything from quite homogenous to highly racially, socioeconomically, and linguistically diverse spaces), and curricular frameworks (e.g. International Baccalaureate, various state standards).
Lillo Kang’s research focuses on educators’ attempts to cultivate engaged and responsive secondary classrooms. Her scholarly expertise includes Global Citizenship Education, representation and censorship in secondary English contexts, service-learning, and culturally responsive teaching. Lillo Kang is primarily a qualitative and mixed methods researcher and is passionate about scholarship that bridges gaps between academic and practitioner silos. She recently co-edited the book, Enacting Equitable Global Citizenship Education in Schools: Lessons from Dialogue Between Research and Practice (Routledge; 2023). She has published in journals including Qualitative Studies, Action in Teacher Education, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Education, the Forum for International Research in Education, and the Journal of Research in International Education. Lillo Kang is active in numerous professional organizations including the Comparative and International Education Society, in which she is Chair of the Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession SIG, and the Association of Teacher Educators.
Prior to this appointment, Lillo Kang was a tenured Associate Professor in Secondary Education at Southeast Missouri State University. She has also held instructional positions at the University of Southern California, the University of California- Irvine, UCLA Extension, and the University of California-Los Angeles.