Sessional Instructor
Bachelor of Education Program courses for elementary teacher candidates: Teaching and Learning English as an Additional Language; Classroom Discourse.
Teaching
Teaching experiences and curriculum development.
My teaching work has moved across teacher education, language learning, early childhood curriculum, and professional development.
What students say
Teaching Experiences
Guest Lecturer
Postgraduate lecture on qualitative research methods, with attention to thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis.
Language Tutor
Mandarin as an additional language for adult learners.
Language Teacher
English as an additional language for K-12 learners.
Language Teacher
English as an additional language for K-12 learners.
Curriculum Development
Lead Researcher & Teacher Training
AI-based EAL curriculum for Chinese early-year learners, connecting language progression, product design, and teacher-facing implementation.
Curriculum Designer & Researcher
Bilingual multimodal preschool curriculum for private preschools and kindergartens in Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Curriculum Designer & Researcher
Literacy-based early childhood curriculum for the One Village One Preschool: Village Early Education Center program.
Professional Development
Training Delivery
Multilingual instructional training modules for a community-school-university afterschool reading program.
Design & Delivery
Governmental teacher training for public kindergarten teachers on teacher questions and feedback in literacy-based activities.
Design & Delivery
Annual teacher training workshops for the One Village One Preschool: Village Early Education Center program.
Teaching statement
Teaching philosophy
My teaching is centered on one word, community. For me, a good class is a learning community where students begin to recognize themselves and one another as part of a shared intellectual project. My role as a teacher is to guide and support that process by creating conditions for participation, reflection, and exchange. Students bring knowledge, questions, and lived experiences that shape the course as it unfolds. They enter as learners, and they also become thinkers, challengers, and co-teachers.
Trust is what allows this kind of community to form. Students are deeply attuned to a teacher’s care, preparation, and commitment. I try to earn their trust by taking their ideas seriously and by designing the course with intention. I also trust students through high expectations with sufficient support. When students learn to trust one another, the classroom becomes a place where they can take intellectual risks, challenge assumptions, and support each other’s growth. Belonging is part of the work of learning. It helps make deep learning possible.
I understand this community through critical sociocultural theories of learning, and also through posthumanist ideas of assemblages. A classroom is made through relations among people, bodies, technologies, and spaces. How we move tables and chairs matters. How we use walls matters. The platforms we teach with matter too, especially when we are walking into a digital-dominant era of higher education! These human and non-human elements all have agency. They can open up possibilities for students’ participation, and they can shape the limits of what becomes possible.
This is why I see a good class as always becoming. Even when I teach the same course, the learning community takes shape differently each time. Students bring different funds of knowledge, purposes, and ways of paying attention. The space changes. The tools change. The questions change. Flexibility, then, is a way of staying responsive to the community as it forms. A strong class keeps becoming with its students, its spaces, its tools, and its shared questions.