I have been teaching for more than fifteen years. My teaching philosophy originates from my learning experiences as an international scholar.  In my teaching of writing, I always underscore the role of cultural and language resources that students grow up with. My teaching of writing has been an outgrowth of such a practice of knowledge making that I engage in both as a teacher and a researcher trained in cross-cultural and multilingual academic contexts. Whether in teaching First Year Composition, Business writing, or Technical Writing courses, my goal thus is to inculcate in students the scholarly habits and critical thinking skills to help them explore how writing woks in the world.

I see my classroom as a contact zone for writers from various language and cultural backgrounds. Such a classroom model creates opportunities for students to talk about and share their writing with others as a community of writers, helping them negotiate tensions arising from their differences in terms of language and cultural backgrounds. With such a theoretical understanding, I design classroom activities by engaging students as collaborative learners, not simply to engage in knowledge making on the theory that more heads are better than one, but to help students engage in working across differences. The planning of my class sessions usually involves discussion of a reading assignment as well as small-group activities that help students collaborate on their writing processes. I particularly want students to think about how writing employs different rhetorical appeals based on students’ lived experiences, helping them in turn to make differences visible.

My goal in teaching writing in first year and advanced writing classes thus is for students to engage in meaningful communication of their ideas through printed texts as well as through other new media forums. Exposing students to different genres, language varieties, cultures, and modalities encourages them to engage in critical explorations of the heterogeneity of those genres, discourses, and media in their writing. Translating their ideas from one mode of thinking into another thus offers students opportunities to explore new dimensions of writing and realize differences in terms of language use, rhetorical patterns, and cultural inflections.