“Our teacher always offered resources that catered to our interests and certain opportunities that could be available to us. She made sure to teach us more than just art. She taught us how art could change our view on everything in our daily lives.”
-- Anonymous student evaluation, ARTS2000E, Fall 2019
My Pedagogy
Diversity, inclusion, and equity have been the core values in my teaching and mentoring. At all course levels, I strive to meet the diverse needs of students through careful selections of course experiences and the incorporation of technology. I aim to make students engage in deep inquiry and become aware of their obligation to make the world more just. My courses, although without an “s” suffix, carry the spirit of service-learning and emphasize the connection between curriculum and civic responsibility. The course projects that I design link the real-world to course concepts and help students establish reciprocal relationships with local, global, or online communities.
I am a firm believer that effective learning occurs when the classroom is student-centered. In my classroom, students can take ownership of learning. Everyone shares the roles of teacher and student: Both my students and I teach, and both my students and I learn. Students are not merely empty vessels to pour into knowledge; rather, the teacher-student relationship I seek to establish is that we are co-teachers, co-learners, and co-investigators, giving and taking from one another through dialogue. Dialogue functions as a purposeful conversation for all class members to think, interpret, reflect, and act together. My curriculum design is to establish a classroom as an open and welcoming place for all students to equally participate in dialogues.
I use digital technologies to enhance student learning for both face-to-face and online courses. To ensure equal opportunities for dialogue, I set up theme-based online forums for students to participate in asynchronous discussions. Through posting and responding in the discussion forums, students learned how to be better netizens by recognizing different perspectives and demonstrating mutual respect.
Teaching is Inseparable from My Research
Teaching plays an important role when I advance my research. The most recent example was my dissertation research that co-investigated digital art activism on social media with my students. I generate this research idea from my students’ written reflections on one of our course projects. Their feedback motivated me to conduct a more theoretical-driven course/research project. Furthermore, my role as a researcher as well as course instructor helped examine how I conceptualized, designed, experienced, and reflected on this study from a more holistic perspective.
Research enriches my teaching. When my research projects related to the course content, I incorporated them into my classroom to cultivate dialogue. For example, when introducing self-portrait as a genre in my visual arts course, I brought my study of social media profile pictures to class. I guided my students to study and discuss the symbolic meanings of their profile pictures on social media. This activity helped my students explore how stereotypes, existing values, cultural legacies, personal identities are connected to their portraiture choices.
Courses I Have Developed and Taught
As a doctoral student at UGA, I have had multiple opportunities to teach. In Fall 2015 - 2016, I served as a Writing Intensive Program (WIP) TA working closely with undergraduate students enrolled in ARED2110: Investigating Critical and Contemporary Issues in Education, ARED3360: Secondary Curriculum in Art Education, and ARED3350: Elementary Curriculum in Art Education. My TA responsibilities included leading course discussions, developing assignment rubrics, grading papers and providing feedback, facilitating writing workshops, ad supervising student teaching in public schools.
During the 2016 - 2017 academic year, I took over as Instructor of Record for ARED3050: Art and the Child, a small-sized, studio-based course designed to enhance instructional skills through art integration with early childhood majors. Since 2017, I had taught ARTS2000: Art Appreciation as both a face-to-face and online course. With an average of 125 students, this course is open to all UGA undergraduates across disciplines to further an understanding and appreciation of visual arts. As Instructor of Record, I independently developed syllabi, prepared course materials, delivered lectures, facilitated discussions, conducted exams and projects, ran office hours, and trained TAs.
Assessment Methods for Learning and Teaching
My assessment is performance-based. I assess students through both formal and informal evaluative assignments. My formal evaluation includes formative and summative methods. Some formative methods—quizzes, in-class discussion, concept maps, reflective memos, short essays—have allowed me to provide timely assistance to students who seemed to need it. Summative methods (e.g. final presentations, final exams, and short/long papers) have been particularly useful for me to locate commonly difficult areas for future classes. Along with these formal evaluative methods, I have used my teaching notes as an informal evaluation to understand students’ overall learning progress.
When assessing my teaching, my teaching notes is a critical tool for me to examine my pedagogy because they are my personal records of and reflections on teaching. Other assessments are course evaluations done by anonymous students and my colleagues/faculty members. Their quantitative evaluations gave me quick access to my overall teaching ability and performance (see attached). Their comments and feedback helped me understand what specific aspects of my teaching impressed or disappointed them and in what ways I could improve.
My Mentorship and Advising
Mentoring and advising are essential but significant to my teaching. I have had a good rapport with the undergraduate students I taught, so I have been a reference for many students’ job or school applications. Although I haven’t had a chance to serve as the primary adviser for Ph.D. students, I learned, from my mentor and through joining professional workshops, that I need to be more like a coach than a teacher. In other words, they have to learn what professors do by doing them under my guidance. I will work closely with them to generate research ideas, conduct and publish studies, present at conferences, and teach thoughtfully.
Future
Moving forward, I am eager to discover new paths toward student engagement and learning effectiveness so I can meet their personal needs and cultivate their fullest potentials. Higher education nowadays is increasingly diverse and digitally laden. I embrace both face-to-face and online instruction and am ready to expand online course offerings if needed. As always, I never assume students already know how to use an online tool, and ways to support students in accessing the technology will be one main concern in my course design. Regardless of the changes that may follow from class sizes, format differences, or technological developments, my task as an educator—guiding, mentoring, and encouraging students to take ownership of their education—remains the same. I will continue to use dialogue as a pedagogical tool to co-investigating knowledge, co-creating transformation, and co-stimulating changes with my future students.