Teaching Philosophy Statement

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”

― Albert Einstein

Teaching has always been an important part of my life. My mom’s passion and enjoyment for teaching has been deeply rooted into my heart when I was young, even though she is in no way an actual teacher by profession. I loved sharing stories about Chinese history with my classmates during lectures or helping other students who are at disadvantages for learning new skills. Being admitted into doctoral program at UC Santa Barbara, the abundant experience I have gained from both lecturing and leading discussion sections has transformed this pure passion into more concrete thoughts and practices. Immersing myself into the discipline, Communication, has enriched my understanding of teaching as a complex, interactive process. Of the utmost importance for me to deconstruct and reconstruct the knowledge in a way that is understandable for students, that is intriguing for them, and that is applicable to their daily lives.

My philosophy for teaching not only comes from my passion for this profession and process, but also is rooted in my love for knowledge. I believe that the ability to learn and adapt is what makes our lives meaningful and sustainable. However, acquiring knowledge is no doubt an extremely arduous task. While recognizing this is going to be a challenge for my students, what I can do is to make it fruitful and reflective. One the one hand, they learn as efficient and effective as they can; on the other hand, they reflect on this process based on their personal experience in past and present. This fruitful and reflective outcome can only come from two essential processes: the transformation of knowledge and encouragement of creative expression.

This first process, the transformation of knowledge, is to provide opportunities for students where they can truly transform their existing knowledge. By “transform”. I am certainly not asking them to make scholarly contributions to the community. Rather, I will ask them to make individual contributions in understanding and utilizing the knowledge that is both personal and practical. The foundation for this process lies in their interaction with the knowledge, interactions with others, and their reflections upon the interactions. Whenever I give lectures on a new theory in my field, I always challenge my students to accomplish two essential tasks:

• Deconstruct the major components of a theory and the relationships between them

• Explain the practical importance of a theory through personal examples to other people

Then, this process is done through a series of in-class activities and out-of-class assignments. In my smaller Introduction to Communication discussion sections, my students not only engage in discussions about the meaning and values of various concepts and theories, but also complete assignments that ask them to apply those theories to real life situations and reflect on the effectiveness of those applications. Through these two activities, students can gain a sense of what are the potential areas of further development and how this theory can be effectively incorporated into their daily lives. Weekly assignments also give me additional opportunities to assess whether they develop a personal but accurate understanding of the content.

The second process, encouragement of creative expression, provides students both a safe environment where they can express their thoughts and a challenging moment when they must be creative. Expression is built upon a personal and deep understanding of knowledge. Creativity, on the other hand, comes from a person’s ability to transform the knowledge and to communicate effectively to other people. In the larger Organizational Communication lecture that I plan to teach, I will ask my students to develop creative plans to demonstrate a concept they are most interested in during class and share with their classmates, and then teach this concept to others in a specific organization they are in. Regarding to creative plans, I encourage them to use drawings, multimedia platforms, creative writings such as fictions, and personal role-plays to express their own understanding of the concepts. These plans not only give my students a chance to reflect on the knowledge, but also allow me to monitor their learning and interpretations.

Through both processes, students are not only passively learning the foundational work of a specific and sometimes highly abstract field, but are also actively engaged with this domain of knowledge, question it, apply it to their own daily interactions, and creatively pass this knowledge on to other people surrounding them. My primary goal is to help students realize that there are so many different things they can do with knowledge that that is fruitful and enjoyable. Communication is a perfect discipline not only because it focuses on the very basic skills and practices that are necessary to accomplish my primary goal but also because it bridges teaching, learning, service, and practice through a very fundamental human behavior—to communicate. I look forward to witnessing the transformation and creation that takes place in my students’ own knowledge domain and continues throughout their lives.