Senior Advisor of CAF Foundation

Dr. Zhixin (Justine) Su is professor of education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies and Lifetime Honorary Director of China Institute at California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She served as Director of the University China Institute for 20 years and designed numerous training programs and joint education research projects in collaboration with Chinese educational institutions and scholars. Dr. Su’s research interests include comparative education, educational leadership, teaching and teacher education, principal preparation and development, urban and rural school reform. Her research reports have been widely presented and published in the U.S., China, and Europe, including UNESCO’s International Review of Education, WCCES’s Global Comparative Education, Oxford Review of Education, Journal of American Education, Comparative Education, Teachers College Record, Journal of School Leadership, Education and Urban Society, Beijing International Review of Education, Frontiers of Education in China and International Journal of Educational Reform. Dr. Su was featured on the cover page of the Journal of World Education in 2012 and her comparative education articles also appeared in Chinese in the China Education Journal, Shanghai Social Sciences Weekly, International Education Exchange, and Chinese Social Sciences Network. In 2019, Dr. Su became the first Asian American scholar to receive the title of “Dewey Lecturer,” one of the highest honors in American education, following the footsteps of her mentor, John Goodlad, as well as other prominent American education scholars including Lawrence Cremin, Lee Shulman, Philip Jackson, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, Nel Noddings, and Eliott Eisner. She delivered the keynote speech on “John Dewey and Chinese Education: A Comparative Perspective” at the John Dewey Society Annual Conference to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Dewey’s historical visit to China in 1919-1921, a most exciting event in US-China history. Her presentation paper was published in the special issue on Dewey and China in Beijing International Review of Education (2019) and was selected to become the first chapter in the historical book, John Dewey and Chinese Education, published by Brill in 2022.