I have strong teaching experience at the college level spanning media and cultural studies, information studies, Asian American Studies, and gender and sexuality studies in seminar-style classes of 10, mid-size classes of 45+, as well as large lecture classes of 150+ with four TAs.
Most recently, I taught two classes as a Lecturer in UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics: “Project Management” and “Organizational Information Systems,” both with approximately 50 students. Both classes involved significant student-directed project work, ranging from building novel mobile phone games, optimizing software interfaces, and conducting ethnographic observations at real-world organizations to identify information flows and suggest improvements. My most recent teaching evaluations from students at UCI show a median overall instructor effectiveness rating of 9/9.
I originated two courses as a Lecturer/Teaching Affiliate for the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin: “Critical Approaches to Asian American Gender and Sexuality” (upper division, enrollment 10-15) and “Introduction to Asian American Studies,” a lower-division survey class with enrollment of about 45, both in Fall 2015. The Gender and Sexuality course was an interdisciplinary deep-dive into intersectional work in Asian American Studies that involved queer theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory, spanning disciplines such as history, literature, media studies, sociology, and anthropology. This class culminated in a scaffolded, peer-reviewed major research paper. The Intro to Asian American Studies course was designed to acquaint students with fundamental tenets of Asian American history and politics as well as intersectional analysis of multiple facets of identity. There is a strong media studies/cultural studies analysis vein in all of the classes I teach.
I taught the lower-division large lecture class “Race, Ethnicity, and the Media” for the Department of Radio-TV-Film at UT twice, each time with approximately 150 students and four TAs. This class is an introduction to concepts such as the historical politics of racial representation, the social construction of race, critical media textual analysis, industry studies, and intersectionality. I piloted another original class at UT, “Mixed Race and the Media,” a seminar with an enrollment of 25 students and was writing-intensive. Additionally, I have TA’d classes throughout the field of media and cultural studies, film studies, and communications studies, such as: “Communication, Technology and Society”; “Narrative Strategies”; “Communication and Ethnic Groups”; “Convergent Hollywood.”
I can offer courses such as “Communication and Technology”; “Race, Gender, and Social Media”; “Queer Media Studies,” and “Digital Platforms and Politics.” I am also eager to offer a course called “Human Centered Design for Equity,” a community-engaged project class in which students tackle a real-world problem through design thinking and practice, including ethnographic interviewing, persona generation, design sprints, and paper prototyping—skills which are immediately legible to industry.
I have taken a college-level pedagogy course, “Supervised Teaching in Radio-TV-Film,” required at Texas for any student wishing to teach on their own (the rank is labeled “Assistant Instructor,” even though it is the sole instructor of record position for the class). All of my classes incorporate an online class discussion or blog component, frequent small group work, and rotating student discussion leadership teams. Additionally, my classes often fulfill requirements such as “Writing Intensive” and “Cultural Diversity in the United States.”
When I first started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008, I figured I had issues of diversity in the classroom figured out – I am a queer person of color, I am trained in critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies, and was teaching classes on these very topics, so they would be woven into everything we talked about in class. I had a lot to learn. How do you handle “diversity,” when diversity sometimes includes students who are conservative, students who monopolize the classroom, or even students who simply will not speak in class at all? (I was one of those in college.) These are a few strategies I have learned and evolved over the course of my teaching:
1. Developing common vocabularies in the classroom with students, real-time. I am consistently ranked very highly in “The instructor made me feel free to ask questions, disagree, and express my ideas”—especially in what were historically poorly-evaluated and contentious “race” classes at UT. I am very proud of this ranking. I think that this ranking is not because I encourage free-for-all discourse in class. Rather, one thing I’ve learned—and I’ve realized is a core component of being a successful classroom teacher at the university level, especially teaching classes on marginalized identities and power—is that students do not come into the classroom trained with precision in their conceptual definitions. So, when a student in a race or gender class I might teach says, “That movie was offensive,” we re-work that statement to be more precise based on what we have covered in class: “That representation of X is just a modern version of a long-standing history of the ‘tragic mulatto’ stereotype,” for example. This not only trains the student in articulation, but has the side effect of creating a halo of precision and buy-in among other students, even resistant ones—it’s a challenge they like to meet. It also avoids having the class descend into pitched and circular interchanges based on “something they heard somewhere.”
2. Alternative assignment and evaluation design. The second time I taught the large lecture class “Race, Ethnicity, and the Media” at the University of Texas, I gave students the option to do an individual final artistic/expressive project that dealt with intersectional issues of race and gender instead of a second critical media analysis paper. I highly scaffolded this assignment, with a required proposal document, feedback from me on this proposal, and a peer review and self-evaluation component including a reflective essay. The results were stunning. One student produced a spoken word video of an original poem entitled “You May Think,” about the ways that people form judgment based on skin and phenotype—but she had about twenty diverse people narrate the poem to the camera, intercut, with herself totally absent from the screen (I still have this, if you want to see it!) Another student, a classically trained dancer, created and performed an original dance performance for us that was a synthesis of Chinese classical dance and Western ballet in which she interrogated her own bi-cultural identity, with a video projection of Swan Lake projected onto her body as she performed. Needless to say, I was moved to tears several times.
3. I have drastically changed the way I encourage, understand, and evaluate “classroom participation” in my classes. I realized that the de rigueur, legacy mode of extemporaneous speaking heavily privileges those who walk into the classroom with that privilege. Undocumented students, international students for whom English is not a primary language, differently-abled students, queer and trans students, may not be able to speak extemporaneously to a roomful of strangers. While I still encourage this heavily, as it is a necessary skill to have as an adult in the working world, I have also included other forms of thinking about participation in my classes: real-time small group work with reports to the class at the end, card-stacking, student hand-offs, online participation, small group presentations including collaborative student-produced discussion guides, are just a few of the alternative modes of participation that I have experimented with in my classes.