Teaching
I have taught hundreds of socioeconomically, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students in the US and China. I encourage students to explore problems from an interdisciplinary perspective and critically engage with the historical, political, and social issues.
Previously Taught Courses
Globalization and Education
This course investigates the ways in which education is inextricably linked to global political, economic, and social contexts. We reflect on both scholarly research and popular conceptions of market, society and schools in different geographic and cultural contexts. The class encourages interdisciplinary analysis. The central focus of the course will attempt to provide students with a critical analysis to understand the challenges facing education in a globalization era, to build stronger commitment to helping address those challenges, and a set of skills for researching and writing about them.
School and Society
This course focuses on the interplay between schools and society by examining (a) societal and cultural influences on school processes, policies, practices, and pedagogy; or, how society shapes schooling, and (b) conversely, the ways in which schools assist in shaping society. We reflect on the purposes of schools and how these purposes have shifted over time. We also reflect on how assumptions regarding the purposes of schooling interact with debates over how we teach, what we teach, and how we evaluate schools, teachers, and students.
Courses in Preparation
Race, Migration and Education
This course critically examines the foundational theories and key debates on race and its transnational constitution. It also studies the role of education on perpetuating and/or countering racial inequities in societies, and the possibilities for more equitable education systems. The point I want students to take away is that race is not fixed nor static. Racial formation as a process works together with other processes, such as globalization to form accumulation and dispossession.
The Global University and the City
This course explores the co-construction of space/place, capital, and knowledge in school-city relationships in neoliberal global economies. We will mainly explore multiple case studies, such as gentrification and urban education, student geography in the global context, as well as the education-led housing transformations around the world. I want students to understand that these processes are neither natural nor inevitable. I will have students prepare a research paper analyzing an intervention in one of our topics—either a specific education program, a social movement, or policy.