Family Friends

Welcome to new FCS faculty Sothy Eng and Rheta Kuwahara! Sothy will be teaching Family Resiliency and Community Development courses, while helping to develop food systems for resilient families and communities in Hawai‘i, Cambodia, and across the Pacific. Rheta will provide instruction in the early childhood and childhood curriculum. Sothy comes to CTAHR from Lehigh University, where he taught graduate courses in comparative and international education and led an international partnership program between Lehigh and Caring for Cambodia, an NGO based in Siem Reap. His areas of expertise include Cambodian education, including access and equity, program development and evaluation, child and adolescent learning and development, family and community development, social capital, remarried families, gender-based violence, and international development. He will be involved in Extension outreach and will teach HDFS classes in Intimacy, Marriages and Family, Community Program Development, and Community Needs and Resources. Rheta, who most recently taught at the Honolulu Community College, has worked in the field of Early Childhood Education for over 25 years in a variety of roles. She was previously the assistant director of the Early Childhood Education graduate program at UH Manoa’s College of Education. She has been a teacher of young children, a pedagogical coach to preschool and elementary teachers of Native Hawaiian children, a culture- and place-based curriculum developer, a parent–child advocate, and an ECE instructor. She too will be teaching classes in Human Development and Family Studies.