Experience

Growing up in a remote mountain area in southwestern China, I could touch the natural world freely since early childhood. So climbing mountains, finding mushrooms, watching birds and picnicking in the woods are the best memories in my mind. After spending 17 years in natural areas, I went to Beijing for college in 2004. On the first day I went to Beijing Forest University, I joined the Scientific Exploration and Outdoor Life Association (SENOL). It was SENOL that opened ways for me to connect to various national and international environmental non-profit organizations. In 2005, leading a SENOL summer team as a freshman to the Tetraena mongolica Maxim Nature Reserve in Inner Mongolia triggered my concern about human impact on the environment. Tetraena mongolica Maxim has been endangered since the 1990s and is still threatened by goat browsing, logging, and pollution from mining. The conflicts between human needs and environmental conservation motivated me to explore a “win-win” solution.

These became my concerns for graduate study at Beijing Normal University in 2008. My experiences in Dr. Qiong Gao’s laboratory enabled me to access model simulations of social-ecological systems. For my Master thesis, I made several field trips to the northern farming-pastoral transitional belt, an ecologically sensitive area in China. I found the marked transformation between farmland and grassland due to different life styles of local people, which inspired me to study land-use spatial-temporal variations. Dr. Gao, who graduated from Cornell University in 1987, encouraged me to pursue a PhD in the US.

Environmental education has fascinated me since I started doing volunteer work at Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in Beijing. In the summer of 2009, as a teaching assistant of the Eco-English project of JGI, I worked with two high school students from the US in environmental education at the Experimental School attached to Haidian Teachers Training College of Beijing. Once a week we offered a forty-minute interactive course in English for high school students addressing a range of topics including endangered species, moon bear farming, and energy consumption to global warming. This experience inspired me to continue participating in environmental education programs. In the summer of 2010, I worked as an intern at JGI helping the Green Life Action program promote low carbon life styles. I designed the toolkits for communities and companies focusing on a range of topics from energy and water saving, to green shopping to recycling. These experiences motivated me to learn more about environmental education.

In August 2011, I started my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Marianne Krasny in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University. Since then, I have been working for EECapacity, a national environmental education training program. I was a teaching assistant for the first online EECapacity course -- Urban Environmental Education -- taught by Drs. Alex Kudryavtsev and Marianne Krasny, which inspired my interests in online learning and social network analysis.

Through EECapacity online courses and workshops, I connected with environmental educators across the US, which helped me develop my research questions and identify research participants for my dissertation. Specifically, at the national training workshop in Washington D.C. in May 2012, I connected with state consortia leaders and piloted a study in California, Colorado and Maryland. Two co-leaders of the Pennsylvania State Consortium showed their interests of examining professional networks in their consortium. I started working with them to conduct surveys and interviews, as well as attended one of their group meetings. In April 2014, Drs. Alex Kudryavtsev and Marianne Krasny facilitated another online learning community -- the Urban Environmental Education project-based online learning community -- in which participants co-authored on an eBook. I thought it was another great example of professional development programs for environmental educators and decided to conduct research with this group.

Thanks to the chance to participate in the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) annual conference in October 2011, I started to build my professional networks with scholars and environmental educators all over the world. In summer 2014, I did an internship with NAAEE in Washington D.C. during which I helped organize workshops and write reports. I co-authored State Environmental Literacy Plans, 2014 Status Report with Judy Braus and others. Further, I helped to organize a weeklong workshop for Community Climate Change Fellowship at the National Conservation Training Center in West Virginia, and met with 26 fellows and conducted a pre-survey in this group.

In fall 2015, I visited Dr. Nicole Ardoin’s Social Ecological Lab at Stanford University as an exchange scholar. It was a wonderful experience to connect to diverse scholars working on cross-disciplinary research. Also I audited Dr. Mitchell Stevens’ course and connected to Lytics Online Learning Research Lab where I met several researchers working on online learning especially Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

During my postdoc and research associate at Cornell, I collaborated with scholars across disciplines and expanded my research on environmental education Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to enhance capacity building for environmental educators in the US and internationally. For example, I led a team of faculty in the Cornell Information Science and Natural Resources and the Environment departments and the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University in developing a research proposal to conduct online experiments in MOOCs designed to enhance local environmental education practices and climate actions, which was funded by the Cornell China Center. We embedded social-psychological interventions, including social norms and social accountability, into different environmental education MOOCs designed to foster self-efficacy and motivation of participants. We conducted surveys and interviews to determine to what extent the interventions influenced participants' learning and actions during and after the course. We also applied the cultural dimensions of learning framework to explore learning preferences of the participants from different countries, and examined how the influence of interventions and learning preferences differ in the US, China, and other countries. We published one journal article in Computer-based Learning in Context, three papers in conference proceedings and are preparing two manuscripts. We have also presented results of these innovative research projects at the international Learning Analytics and Knowledge, Learning at Scale, and North American Association for Environmental Education conferences.

With funding and support from the Office of Engagement Initiatives at Cornell, which aims to promote community-engaged learning, I led several research projects to explore students’ engaged learning through working with community organizations to address environmental and climate challenges. For example, I examined university students’ engaged learning through serving as teaching assistants for environmental MOOCs. I also conducted interviews with faculty across disciplines at Cornell to explore how they integrate online technologies into their engaged teaching practices. We have published one article in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement and another in the Online Learning journal.

As an assistant professor at UWSP, I broadened my research areas including nature-based environmental education, transformative learning experiences and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into teaching. I worked on two literature review projects: one comparing environmental education research in Japan and China, and the another exploring current state of research on nature-based environmental education in China. Additionally, I led a team in examining trends of nature-based environmental education in China by coding hundreds of lesson plans from environmental educators, university students, parents, and volunteers. Furthermore, I collaborated on a project exploring university students’ place attachment to campus through a photo-sharing online community in the Environmental Psychology course. Alongside my colleagues at UWSP, I investigated educational doctoral students’ transformative learning experiences and university instructors’ attitudes and approaches with incorporating AI into teaching. I also collaborated with  at UW-Madison to examine university students’ experiences using AI in STEM learning. My experiences at UWSP have enabled me to connect to colleagues across various educational fields, enriching my understanding of the intersection between environmental and educational research.

I am currently embarking on research exploring the use of A in environmental education (EE) for educators and students, aiming to enhance their AI literacy and improve EE outcomes.