Tenth Annual Vietnamese-American Youth Excellence Program

This year, Vietnamese Culture and Science Association is proud to present the Tenth Annual Youth Excellence Recognition program. In this event, we will also celebrate a great milestone: the 10th anniversary of this meaningful program. We will invite the past 140 honorees to come back and join us at this celebration. There will be a video presentation to feature highlights of these programs in the past 10 years. We also would like to encourage the younger generations of Vietnamese-Americans to excel in education by recognizing the outstanding academic and leadership achievements of the Vietnamese-American high school students in the Houston and vicinity areas, who graduated as Valedictorian or Salutatorian of their respective schools. We will also include some cultural performances related to the Vietnamese culture during the Luncheon.

Keynote Speaker: Huong Tran Nguyen, PHD

Since the fall of 1998, Dr. Nguyen has been a faculty member of the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. Her research interest is in how race, language, culture, and identity impact the development of ethnic minority teachers -- particularly foreign-born -- in U.S. contexts. She has been teaching foundations of education courses and post-baccalaureate credential courses for Single Subject (secondary) and Multiple Subject (elementary) teacher candidates. In addition, she has been supervising pre-service teachers seeking the Cross-cultural, Language and Academic Development (CLAD) or Asian Bilingual Cross-cultural, Language and Academic Development (BCLAD). In her teaching and supervisory roles, she has dedicated herself to recruiting, developing, and retaining candidates from minority backgrounds, particularly Asian Americans, to diversify the teaching force to reflect the student population in California public schools.