Tears and Triumph: Video resurfaces of professor’s emotional Disney Teacher Awards speech honoring educators and immigrant students
At her recent retirement party, video resurfaced of a remarkable moment in the career of College of Education Professor Huong Tran Nguyen: The night she won two national teaching awards and brought educators and celebrities to tears with speeches at an Oscars-like ceremony.
It was 1994, and Nguyen was a teacher at Long Beach Polytechnic High School. After a national competition involving reams of paperwork and hours of interviews, she won “Outstanding Teacher of Foreign Languages and English as a Second Language” and then “Outstanding Teacher of the Year” honors at Disney’s American Teacher Awards.
The annual ceremony honors educators “who inspire the joy of learning” among the nation’s public and private PK-12 schools.
Nguyen, wearing a sequined gown provided by Disney, delivered moving speeches imploring communities to support immigrant students, encouraging parents to get involved in education, and asking the media to focus on what’s right, not wrong, with America’s schools, according to a video unearthed by a College of Ed staffer.
The video then cuts to members of a star-studded audience in tears including Oscar-nominated actress Melanie Griffith.
Nguyen says her off-the-cuff speeches were so emotional because it was triggered by the aftermath of Proposition 187 when many of her students were being vilified and denied social services because they were undocumented.
“I was just completely overwhelmed with emotion representing the most vulnerable in the school system at a very difficult time in our history,” Nguyen said. “I spoke with the faces and the voices of my students (in mind).”
Nguyen is herself a onetime international student and later Vietnamese refugee whose teaching career started in San Diego County. She went on to become a district-level administrator there working on curriculum development, including translation of high school social studies instructional materials in the students’ heritage languages for the first wave of immigrant refugee students from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Communities struggled to serve the population, fomenting intolerance. So, Nguyen also visited schools, hospitals, police departments and nonprofits listening to people’s concerns, building trust and problem-solving in hopes of heightening others’ awareness of and sensitivity to the challenges students and their families faced in schools and society.
“Our work, while very challenging, brought about changes in shifting the way people saw this new population of immigrants,” she said.
Nguyen’s work impressed the Long Beach Unified School District, which recruited her to work on curriculum development there. She later returned to her first love of teaching and taught at three K-12 Long Beach schools including Poly.
Her work at Poly was featured in a pre-taped video shared at the Disney awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.
“I want every single one of my students to be productive citizens, to contribute instead of to take from,” Nguyen says in one video clip.
In another, a student still working on her English says of Nguyen: “She come like us, she didn’t speak English. And she understand us when we have problems. I love her.”
From 1995 to 1996, Nguyen was a senior fellow at the U.S. Department of Education traveling the country and world on projects, including with the Office of Civil Rights and White House Fellows program, for then-Education Secretary Richard Riley.
She returned home to be closer to her family — her husband and two sons — and in 1998 joined Cal State Long Beach to prepare K-8 future educators for working with students in urban schools and to supervise emergency-permit teachers assigned to schools serving significant numbers of English-language learners.
During her 27-year career in the College of Education, Nguyen also was interim chair of the Teacher Education Department and led implementation of a five-year federal grant to support 75 Ӱ single-subject faculty in their development of curriculum materials and pedagogical practices to prepare teacher candidates to meet the academic and social needs of secondary students.
Nguyen also mentored CED pre-tenure faculty as facilitator of the college-wide Faculty Success Group.
In 2018, Nguyen earned Ӱ’s Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. This year, theCollege of Education chose her to serve as grand marshal at its commencement ceremony.
“Serving as 2025 grand marshal representing the College of Education and leading our exuberant and proud graduating students to their Angel Stadium ceremonies was an honor for me, closing my 27-year professional career at Ӱ,” she said.
