Dr. Tam Wei; photo provided.

98-years young alumna Tam Thi Dang Wei shares about her life and academic experiences before, during, and after coming to the United States in 1955.

Since I had a rather unusual type of professional career, I feel that I need to give a brief summary of my background to clarify the reasons for my actions and the various experiences in my life.

I was born in Vietnam in 1926, a war-torn country for many, many decades. We fought against the Chinese and then against the French to regain our independence, but then a civil war continued with the North of Vietnam (communist) against the South of Vietnam (independent), ending in 1975. 

From my youngest years, I always loved teaching. I started my career in teaching early in life. While in high school, I started teaching the villagers how to read and write during the summer. Next, I taught in a Catholic school. Despite the fact that I had only a high school diploma with no special training in education, the Mother Superior was touched by my sincere love for the children and allowed me to teach. It was a wealthy private school with two teachers for twenty students, and soon I felt that I could help more students in a public school. After passing a teaching exam, I became a teacher at an elementary school in Vietnam with a class of 40 to 45 students.

After a few years of teaching, I felt the need for more training and learning in education—especially in psychology—to be a “good” teacher. Now with a bachelor’s degree and the help of a government scholarship, I decided to go to Geneva, Switzerland because Switzerland is the most peaceful country in the world. Also in Geneva, French is used in school, and I was fluent in French.

A Pupil of Piaget

In 1952, I left Vietnam for Switzerland and enrolled in the Psychology Department at the University of Geneva. I was very lucky to have professor Jean Piaget as my principal professor. It was an intense learning experience. Eager to learn, I graduated in just three and a half years. My concentrations were in Developmental Psychology of Piaget and Early Childhood Education. I finished as “Licentiate” in educational psychology and developmental psychology of Piaget with diplomas in early childhood education, in pedagogy, in education of exceptional children, in mental health in the school, and in diagnostics.

I was very fortunate to have a rewarding experience in those years studying in Geneva. I still believe in the Developmental Psychology of Piaget, in his humanistic way of looking at the development of an individual. I learned to be more open minded, more flexible in my judgments of others, and have used extensively his method of “clinical observation” throughout my professional career.

Love for Learning, Teaching, and the University of Illinois

I came to the United States in 1955. I was planning to return to Vietnam to work, but my love for learning made me think that I should continue to study. I decided I would try to go to the United States. It was a scary and challenging thought, but somehow I managed it. 

Arriving in New York in early 1955, my first destination was Marian College, a Catholic women’s college in Indianapolis, Indiana. Marian College was a beautiful campus with very welcoming and caring nuns. Unfortunately, it was an undergraduate college and I was already in graduate school. Staying there for a month to rest, I returned the scholarship I had been awarded and moved on, with a brief stint at Loyola University in Chicago.

Eventually, a friend suggested that I should visit the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It seemed like fate. I fell in love with the university and the community. I also met my future husband, Lun Shin Wei, a graduate student from Taiwan who studied Agronomy and Food Sciences. Lun Shin asked me to help him to improve his French, a language requirement for his Ph.D. program. We found that we had many similarities in our backgrounds, our hopes, our dreams. We quickly fell in love and Lun Shin proposed. We were married at his advisor’s home in Urbana, with an invited judge to officiate our marriage.

It was 1956, I enrolled in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois, and Lun Shin and I were starting a family. The department had agreed to admit me to the graduate program with the condition that I must pass the Ed.M. proficiency exam. I decided to take courses for the master’s degree in education and continue to a Ph.D. At that time, in the 1950s, Piaget’s theory of Developmental Psychology was not yet well known. I took courses in both Educational Psychology and Psychology to reinforce my studies at the University of Geneva. Professors for my dissertation were Dr. Steward Jones and Dr. Cecilia Stanley Lavitelli in the Department of Educational Psychology and Dr. JMC Hunt and Dr. Morton Weir in the Department of Psychology.

My dissertation was titled “Piaget’s Concept of Classification. A Comparative Study of Socially Disadvantaged and Middle-Class Children.” I thus received my Ed.M. in Educational Psychology in 1958 and my Ph.D. in Educational Psychology in 1966 from the College of Education at Illinois.

From 1962 to 1969, I taught courses in the Department of Educational Psychology and taught as head teacher for the Child Development Laboratory, providing training to teachers in early childhood education. My best memory of teaching in Educational Psychology was leading a class on mental health in 1969. It was a 4-week summer class, a large class—all adults—counselors, teachers, nuns, and so forth, returning to school for some extra credits. Especially at the time, mental health was such a vague concept. I decided to use a practical approach of teaching, using no textbook, organizing the class into small groups with the assignment that each group worked together to decide on a topic relating to mental health in schools, then write a paper to be discussed in class later. The result was interesting! The class did not end after four weeks. Some students continued to come to my house, and over a sack lunch we continued to discuss and tried to solve issues and problems together.

Career Shifts for Community Needs

In 1970, with a young family and teaching full-time, I realized that I could not manage everything well. I took a job as a school psychologist working three days a week. For 10 years (1970-1980), I traveled over 100 miles a day, covering 14 schools in Ford and Iroquois counties. At first, I wondered how I would be received in this role. The Vietnam War was still going on. I was Vietnamese, a woman, and a psychologist and going in to their school trying to solve problems! But surprisingly, my sincerity in trying to help and be an advocate for the children came through. It was a challenging but rewarding job.

In 1975, my life and career changed completely when Vietnam fell to the Communists. The influx of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia started to arrive in Champaign-Urbana. As one of the only Vietnamese in the area, I felt that I must do something. So with the help of a minister, Reverend P. Harris, and a lawyer, we formed a steering committee. We started meeting with local churches to search for sponsors and financial assistance for refugees.

I soon became completely involved with refugee aid, and in 1981 started the refugee center ECIRMAC (East Central Illinois Refugee Mutual Assistance Center). What a name! Luckily now the center’s name is just the Refugee Center. We had a board comprised of local community members and leaders of our refugee groups to oversee and guide us. 

It was a busy place with so much to do, welcoming new refugee arrivals, finding places for them to live, contacting social services, enrolling children in school, education for adults, finding employment and cooperating with employers, law enforcement, hospitals, doctors, judges. Our hope was to ease the cultural conflicts for the refugees and provide others with a better understanding of refugees’ needs.

Seeing the need of education for the young ones, in 1983 I went back to school for certification as an administrator and became Director of the Bilingual Education Center in Champaign Unit 4 Schools. Amazingly, these refugee students were so eager to learn. I am so proud to say that all my high school students graduated, and one of them went on to become a brain surgeon!

As the only school psychologist in Champaign Unit 4 Schools at that time, I was involved in the evaluation, educational planning, and mental health-related problems of the Vietnamese refugee students. I began doing work as a bilingual psychologist consultant for many schools in Illinois. I gave numerous workshops, in-service trainings for teachers and social services workers throughout the United States with topics on cross-cultural sensibilities, mental health related problems, non-biased assessment for bilingual limited English-speaking students, self-concept development and motivation, the Amerasians, and unaccompanied minors.

'Teachers Can Contribute to Building Worldwide Peace and a Better Future'

Some of my publications over the past decades include: Handbook for Teachers of Refugees (1977); Vietnamese Refugee Students: A handbook for school personnel (1980-1984); “The Vietnamese Refugee Child: Understanding Cultural Differences" in The Bilingual Exceptional Child (1984); A Vietnamese Psycho-Educational Module (1985).

Now at the age of 98, I feel that I was very lucky to have many opportunities to learn and grow. My years abroad studying with Jean Piaget helped me become a better teacher, a better person with a better understanding of human development and human nature. The years in the United States reinforced my knowledge in psychology and teaching and gave me more experiences in a variety of jobs such as teaching college students, working as a school psychologist, and dealing with refugees.

Upon reflection, I have come to this conclusion: a “good teacher” is a person who can motivate and develop strong interest in students to learn. If teaching a “different” student, either because of disability, language barrier, or any other reasons, we must be sensitive and flexible in our judgements. Throughout my professional career, I extensively used the clinical method for observation of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology, which helped me to have a more objective view of the situation and be able to find a better solution for the problem.

What is meant by “critical observation?” When dealing with a student, I would try to look into all aspects of his or her life—physically, emotionally, socially—and the plus and minus points on each area. But I also tried to be aware of my own feelings, my own preconceived ideas in certain areas before I could look into the facts. Only then would I be able to objectively make judgments. My hope and dream is that in our work as teachers we can contribute in some way to building worldwide peace and a better future for the next generation.