As an educator, I strive to create a safe and comfortable learning environment where students from diverse backgrounds mutually grow by sometimes corroborating and sometimes challenging each other’s viewpoints. To that end, I have three main objectives for student learning outcomes.
I seek to integrate questions of social justice into the content of the courses by drawing attention to voices often silenced and marginalized. My role is to keep asking difficult questions and make students reflect on how their life experiences shape their views on these social issues. Instead of being a container of mere facts, I expect my students to cultivate social responsibility to be agents of positive social change in our global society.
One of my most successful ways of teaching is to empower students to teach one another. Through project-based learning, students can develop key arguments, design tasks to apply ideas from reading materials, incorporate multimodal technology into the presentation, and create questions for small-group discussion. I hope my students will develop self-directed learning and problem-solving skills to take the initiative, with or without the help of others.
Diversity in and out of the classroom will continue to grow, so it is essential to set students up to flourish in their future workplace. I pay particular attention to foster students’ critical cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative skills. By developing those soft skills, students are better equipped to communicate with people from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in various professional situations.