Dr. Rosie Kar Named 2023 Fullerton College Faculty of the Year
Ethnic Studies Adjunct Faculty Member Dr. Rosie Kar has been named the 2023 Fullerton College Faculty of the Year.
Dr. Rosie Kar is a second-generation South Asian American of Sindhi and Bengali ancestry. Born and raised in Southern California, she is the child of immigrants and grandchild of political refugees via the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Kar has been exposed to the academic world from a young age, having come from a family of academics and educators. She credits her parents and grandparents as her first teachers.
Kar pursued academic training in the humanities and teaching. She learned how to teach by doing and by having excellent teachers around her.
“I learned how to teach from wonderful models. Teaching is a process and practice. I teach to learn, and I teach to serve,” she said. “That ethos comes from my elders, my grandparents, my parents. They have always stressed service, serving the people.”
Kar has taught thousands of undergraduate students at both the community college and university levels. She recognizes that students need different kinds of support systems for their learning and aims to provide inclusive and accessible Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies courses with engaging and timely content. She taught at CSU Long Beach for nearly a decade in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; the Department of English, the Comparative World Literature Program, and the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. She also taught at UC Santa Cruz in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.
Kar joined Fullerton College in fall of 2019 after a conversation with fellow educator, Fullerton College Ethnic Studies Professor Dr. Amber Rose González, who informed her that the department had demonstrated a need for an Asian American Pacific Islander Desi American Studies instructor. Kar threw her hat in the ring and applied for the position.
Much of Kar’s teaching is informed by the late Dr. bell hooks, who wrote that “it is crucial that we teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.”
“It’s not just work. It’s a joy to be with students in the classroom together,” Kar said. “I think it’s really important to cultivate that kind of community and care.”
Kar has cultivated this sense of collective and community care within her classroom. Associated Students President Chloe Serrano is taking Kar’s Intro to Women’s Studies and Intro to Asian Pacific Islander American Studies classes and has seen firsthand the care she has for her students.
“Professor Kar teaches students to not only fight for their community but themselves,” Serrano said. “In her class, I not only feel much more connected to learning about my heritage but also feel like a stronger, unapologetic connection with myself.”
Kar’s pedagogical approach is guided by three steps: First, introduce tangible problems in the world. Next, introduce conceptual frameworks that speak to these problems, grounding them in theoretical and historical contexts; and lastly, return to step one and reconsider the problems to propose transformative solutions and more refined questions.
“I think that in our department, we really stress that we can’t do anything alone,” Kar said. “We have to do it in community. I am so lucky to count Dr. Ziza Delgado-Noguera, our current department coordinator, and Dr. Amber Rose González, as my colleagues and friends.”
Kar holds a BA in Literatures of the World from UC San Diego, an MA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, with doctoral emphases in Feminist Studies and Asian American Studies from UC Santa Barbara.
The Faculty of the Year is selected by a committee comprised of members from Associated Students and Faculty Senate. Kar will be honored at a Teacher of the Year celebration later this spring.
Kar will be submitted as a NOCCCD nominee for the Orange County Department of Education’s 2024 OC Teacher of the Year. The regional award seeks to recognize community college teachers in Orange County whose efforts have inspired and enabled students to improve their lives in ways specifically attributable to that teacher.
