Real-Life Application: Critical Thinking & Reflexivity

My teaching beliefs, values, and practices have been cultivated through my transnational academic journey. My core value in teaching is to encourage students to apply their knowledge to real-life situations. Specifically, I highlight that critical thinking is first and foremost an essential ability for the student learning community and practice real-life applications. By critical thinking, I mean a productive and constructive process of communication to challenge the conventional ways to view themselves, communities, society, and the world. To design assessments meaningful and critically-oriented, I provide clear and organized instructions and prompts with a specific focus on power structures for students. In semester evaluations, critical orientations and organized structures of the courses are often referred to as effective for student learning experiences. As an example of my teaching excellence, one student stated in evaluations: “He was very approachable, easy going, clear, and provided hands on learning which I really liked. The assignments were very easy to understand and he provided a lot of critical feedback which helped me in other assignments down the line. I felt challenged but also at ease due to how clear he made the rubric and/or instructions.”

As one of the main goals I feel it is most important for my students to attain is the real-life applications of students’ knowledge (e.g., personal experiences, concepts/ideologies, and theories), courses are designed to be praxis-oriented, fostering personal self-growth and communication literacy. Applications of knowledge are vital in higher education because it gives students transferrable skills, tools, and abilities for their personal and professional successes. One of the overarching learning objectives for students in my courses is to understand themselves as cultural beings and critically reflect on self and other awareness about identities and cultures. Because the discipline of communication examines messy, complex, and nuanced human interactions and behaviors in and across everyday relational, cultural, political, and institutional contexts, I value applying structured knowledge that requires a commitment for students to be critically self-reflexive.

To encourage their ability for critical thinking and reflexivity, I always assign students an activity about their self to provide an opportunity for closely reflecting on their identities and cultures. For example, each student holds unique experiences and interpretations of everyday intercultural relations and interactions. Thus, it is crucial for each student to clearly and critically articulate and reflect on who they are and how they make sense of the way they view themselves, the people around them, and society in engaging conversations about identity, culture, space/place, and communication. In doing so, I ask students questions in the activity such as: Who am I? How do I identify myself? What have I been told about who I am by family or society? What is my culture? I discuss with students how identities are socially constructed and institutionalized which simultaneously form our lenses to see themselves and society. After the completion of my courses, students should be able to see the world and its persisting matrix of power through their critical lenses. As evidence of my teaching effectiveness, one student reacted in evaluations: “I appreciate that the course material, lessons, and homework is applicable to life. The instructor used a wide variety of teaching methods which I found to be refreshing. I also really liked that he gave constructive criticism and feedback on every assignment.” The real-life application of knowledge has been a consistent theme I receive in evaluations from students as one of the features of how my teaching contributed the most to their learning. 

Learning Outcomes & Assessment

I assess their learning via a variety of teaching methods such as reflection journals, critique papers, observations, teamwork, presentations, co-teaching, and research. To assess student learning outcomes, I use a method of conducting a sequential small activity throughout the semester. For example, at the beginning of the semester in Public Speaking, I ask students a simple question, “what is Public Speaking?” and let them write down a short answer about their first impression and/or prior knowledge of public speaking. Then, I ask the same question again toward the end of the semester. After they have written out their answers, I give them back the collected responses from the beginning of the semester and make them compare their previous and current answers. Many students are often surprised by how much their answers have changed since the beginning of the semester. One of the memorable responses in evaluations was: “I thought public speaking was just a tool to be a better speaker on public occasions. But now I realized it is also an empowerment of the self in many ways. I feel like I became more insightful about how I engage with the content of speech topics and gained confidence myself.” This student’s response illustrated how the first impression of public speaking was simply a speech tool and eventually shifted its meaning to overall self-empowerment. They also share their own responses with classmates and discuss similarities, differences, and changes. Thus, this way of assessment not only does visualize their individual self-growth but also provides a collective space for everyone to review, synthesize, and summarize what they have learned together as a class. This method is one of the examples that has particularly been useful in a variety of courses with interdisciplinary topics.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Diversity is a central and salient concept communicated through my identity, culture, teaching strategies, and classroom environment. By diversity, I mean the extensive spectrum of identities, cultures, and spaces that dialogue and interact with one another. More specifically, I acknowledge and privilege the voices of historically marginalized individuals and groups of people such as women, LGBTQ, black, indigenous, people of color, and other subaltern communities around the globe. I remind students that we are living in an already messy process of communication that continuously (re)produces privileged and marginalized positionalities and relationalities through the sociohistorical power structures. Moreover, I understand academic challenges pertaining to ESL learners, students of color, and students from humble socioeconomic backgrounds based on my international/intercultural experiences in the U.S. Thus, diversity is a core value in my teaching in advocating for social justice and more inclusive and equal space in the learning community.

To foster diversity in the classroom, I urge both myself and students to carefully examine what we often consider as normal – seemingly unquestionable, natural, and universal – communicative encounters. We discuss our own experiences and connect our unique voices to challenge the dominant discourses and structures of power. For example, in applying critical thinking skills, I highlight how we use English as a global, imperial language. I also discuss with students about the historical continuum of power that maintains and reinforces privilege and marginalization. Moreover, I am attentive to students’ diverse learning styles. Specifically, I design assignments that allow students to choose how they want to demonstrate their learnings. For example, I provide multiple options such as writing papers/reflections, giving oral presentations, and creating infographics for some of the projects based on students’ preferred learning styles to showcase the synopsis of what they have learned in the course. But simultaneously, I must acknowledge the difficulty of actually practicing diversity in academia where philosophical/theoretical knowledge have historically been produced and developed through the colonial matrix of power. Thus, I will continue to challenge myself to interrogate what it means to practice diversity in higher education.

Transparency and Collaboration

To establish the classroom as a productive, collective, and inclusive space for students to exchange their perspectives and explore a variety of issues, I embrace transparency as an educator. By being transparent, I mean sharing my experiences and vulnerabilities with students. For example, I tell my students that “I am not a perfect human who knows everything.” Rather, there are knowledge and issues I am unaware of or blind to, and I have consistently been growing and learning new and/or different experiences, senses, and insights from students and everyday interactions with others in my teaching career. Thus, I strongly value discussion opportunities in facilitating students’ learning — using the classroom as an inclusive space for students to discuss and exchange their ideas, perspectives, and voices with each other. Importantly, my teaching style is collaborative and discussion-based because I understand that the processes of teaching and learning always consist of the act of sharing. For example, I share pieces of myself (e.g., identity, culture, experiences, perspectives, feelings, and more) with students and the people around me when I teach and learn. Hence, collaborative and discussion-based approaches have guided me to become a teacher who is inclusive, transparent, and student-centered.

In envisioning my future goals for growth as a teacher, I continue to interrogate the ways how I can incorporate the idea/act of care in pedagogy. Especially, since the COVID-19 pandemic, I have been asking myself, how do/can I practice care for students? What would an active process of building ecological coalitions of care look like in teaching and the classroom? Relating to the idea/act of care, one of the efforts I have made to enhance the effectiveness of my teaching is to carefully listen to students’ voices and work with them individually. In this way, I try to identify what kind of support students need based on their life/academic situations and circumstances. In the past, I reached out to one student who seemed distracted in class. I started by casually asking “How is it going? Is everything alright?” and the student told me that he was having a hard time focusing because of the difficult family situations related to COVID-19. I listened to his circumstance and discussed with him how I can best support his learning experience in the class. By closely working with him, he was able to successfully complete the course with high-quality work. Thus, based on this experience, I learned the importance of care—carefully listening to the voices of students and working with them to identify their needs and how I can best support them in achieving their successes.