CURRENT POSITION

Overall

I am a loyal follower of Confucius and Socrates in terms of my teaching philosophy. The main idea of education for both Confucius and Socrates was learning through self-improvement. This is a remarkable similarity in the teaching of these two greatest educators, despite the fact that they were thousand miles apart. My understanding is that this idea mainly includes two interconnected aspects. One is for teachers themselves. They must devote themselves to a never-ending process of self-improvement. The second is for the interaction between teachers and students. Teachers must respect students and regard them as active learning agents capable of pursuing knowledge and carrying out self-improvement. A teacher must act in a way that: “To listen silently, to learn untiringly, and to teach others without being wearied.” (Analects, 7:2). This is the doctrine I have worshiped since the very beginning of my teaching career. 

To Learn Untiringly

 The first thing that really stands out in both Confucius and Socrates’ teachings and their teaching practice is their tremendous love of learning and their continual and life-long efforts to improve themselves. To be a good teacher Confucius believed he had to continually be a good student. This continual striving to better himself was the driving force for his teaching activities and it gave him an enduring energy to better others. It is obvious that I can only help others to the extent of my own wisdom and knowledge. Therefore, if I truly desire to assist others to become wiser and more knowledgeable, my

first goal of teaching is to learn to be as wise and knowledgeable as I can and be open to learning as much as I can. I must be vigilant and disciplined with myself. This requires a burning desire of learning. In the process of learning, I must discipline myself with love, diligence, persistence, perseverance, endurance, and patience. 

To Teach Others Without Being Wearied

As a teacher, I care deeply about my students’ learning. I have a strong sense of responsibility when I am teaching. Personally, I am a highly sensitive person—I am sensitive to my surroundings and always ready to adjust myself for the benefit of a good and smooth social environment. When I am interacting with my students, I am relational and my enjoyment of learning and teaching is embedded in my heart-to-heart connection to my students. I do not set myself up as a person of authority, wisdom and knowledge. I am clear about my own limitations and do not allow it to put down or hold back my students. I encourage my students to learn together with me, even through friendly rivalry. As Confucius said, “When it comes to goodness, one need not avoid competing with one’s teacher.” (Analects, 15:35) Confucius recognized that people learn in different ways with varying abilities, and the highest class was even beyond him.  

Therefore, a correct understanding about my students would be critical for me to formulate my teaching philosophy. There are two questions need to be answered: what is the true excellence of each of my students? How can I help them further develop this quality? How can I teach according to my students’ aptitude and start from where my students are without having to lower my standard? The way for me to do this is to formulate my class design according to my students’ needs from the theoretical height of

sociology. Therefore, I organize all my classes around one question: How can I train effective members and/or future leaders in a wide variety of areas of the society from the vantage point of sociology? The question can also be formulated like this: how can I make sociology an effective tool for my students to become most constructive members of the society and contribute their most to the betterment of human existence? Here, the role I play is not an academic researcher, nor a preacher, nor a critic. Inside and outside my classrooms, I am a learned social scientist using cutting-edge sociological knowledge to convince my students that the best way to construct their personal life and the best way for them to contribute to the society is through learning.

There are two inter-connected parts of this training as I understand it. The first is technical part and the second is theoretical part. The technical part enables my students to get their hands dirty to deal with the daily routines. The theoretical part will make them be independent thinkers. To cover the technical part, I ask a question in all the courses I teach: What can sociology do for you to get a job and keep it? I relate my teaching to the real jobs in the areas of human resource management, social services, legal service, marketing research, organizational consulting, governmental activities, and, of course, sociological research and teaching. 

In the mean time, I ask my students another question: What can sociology do for you to advance your career and make you become a leader? This question would lead me to cover the theoretical aspect by focusing on scientific way of thinking and historical patterns and regularities of human behavior as they are illustrated by different sociological theories. Because of the universally applicable power of sociological

conceptualization, it can therefore benefit students from all academic majors on both technical and theoretical fronts. 

Goals of My Teaching

 As I mentioned above, the primary goal of my teaching is to train my students to be effective members and/or productive leaders of the society on different levels. For this purpose, they have to be sophisticated consumers and effective users of social research. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between sociological theories and the real life experiences. I hope that upon completion of the courses, my students would be more informed and critical readers of academic work, news accounts, and all published or online materials. As discerning consumers of information, they are able to distinguish the good information from the bad and know how to collect it, manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it. They should also be able to use the sociological perspectives to analyze social patterns that are most relevant to their daily lives. As effective producers, they are trained to do research for a purpose of convincingly formulate their ideas and defend them.

Specifically, my first goal is to help my students know the basics of the discipline of sociology. I refer to sociological theories as tools in a tool box for my students to pick. But they have to know the functions of the tools before they are able to use them. I see it as my job to help my students develop the understanding of the mainstream sociological theories and go further to develop a critical understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each theory. After the students have completed the courses, they should be

able to master the basic principles of the theories and to develop their own critiques about the practical applications of each of them. 

 The second goal is to help the students develop reading comprehension skill to better understand social research information and to write convincingly. I often observe that my students lack of reading comprehension and professional writing skills and are not very clear about how to get the ideas from the reading materials and are often confused about how to formulate a writing project. Again we need to appreciate that they are in fact novices. It is my task to motivate them. 

The third goal of my teaching is to help my students develop academic skills that will transcend the classroom world. Skills of course include research techniques for doing research projects and presenting papers at professional conferences. I think that a good teacher pays attention to these advanced skills and helps students develop a stronger sense of academic confidence in their ability to perform these skills beyond the classroom settings. But more fundamentally, I focus on teaching students the so called “portable skills”—critical thinking, logical reasoning, making connections between ideas and knowing how to keep on learning. And equally important, I teach them “global mindedness”—sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant with global economy, able to foresee the big picture across the globe. 

Teaching Strategies

 My strategies to accomplish these goals include the following:

First strategy is to prepare clear and organized classroom presentations. I organize lectures with power point software. I give clear outlines of major theories and concepts so

that students are able to grasp important ideas in each class session. I believe that by taking some responsibility for organizing the material, adding updated theories, asking open-ended questions, appreciating students’ original ideas that are different from traditional theories in the textbook, I am able to inform students with new knowledge and empower them with basic concepts and critical thinking. 

In addition to lectures, however, I think there are other forms of instruction that are equally beneficial. The forms that I most often use in the past few years are the discussion and the application exercises. 

 I organize many group or class discussions. Sometimes I ask my students to watch a piece of video and then gave a detailed list of discussion questions. Sometimes I ask them to read a short article and then discuss my questions about it. And sometimes I ask my students to come up with discussion questions after reading or watching something and then I answer the questions together with them in class. The discussions are effective because students have specific contents and topics to discuss. Since I give them clear guidance for the discussion, they do it more carefully and seriously. 

 In terms of application, I encourage my students to link specific sociology concept/theory to a social issue/problem. It is an effective strategy in that students not only have the opportunity to see “how sociology works” but also play a role in developing critical thinking and working out the solutions to resolve social problems. For example, in my Principles class, I ask my students to watch a piece of video about a common issue between a husband and a wife in a family—how to divide the household chores. There is a solution offered by a psychologist. I ask my students to come up with a sociological solution to this common but damaging problem in family life. In this way,

the students would get a clear sense about what sociology is all about and what is its power in solving very realistic social problems.

Since I see writing as being crucial to college-educated students, I make writing as an important part in my classroom. In my classes, I make sure to assign adequate amount of readings and require my upper level class students to write many papers each semester. For example, in all my upper level classes, the students write several five-page papers during the semester. I spend a huge amount of time to read and grade the papers for a purpose of helping my students become more effective readers and better writers.

The other goal of these papers is to help the students develop analytic ability in interpreting theories and see the relevance of sociology to their everyday lives. They can therefore develop their own “voices” in analyzing theories and applying them into social practices. Students at first repeat or summarize theories in the textbook or lecture notes, the most frequent comment is that they do not know what to critique or challenge about. However, as the semester goes on, students find more and more of their own points of view and they are able to bring their critical voices into the dialogues between theories and practices and the quality of the papers increases. I find that the simple practice of writing papers helps my students develop the confidence to think more academically, and to see connections between theories and realities they might have missed earlier.

 One of my most important teaching methods is to be an attentive listener. Patience and perseverance are those qualities to which I love to adhere. In addition to the efforts of maintaining a learning atmosphere of friendship and even camaraderie with my cheerfulness, enthusiasm, and humor, I try to demonstrate not only intellectual subtlety but also mental sensitivity toward the inner feelings of my students.

 The Confucian and Socratic informal and primarily conversational method is used in order for me to focus on personal problems or specific goals of each student. While I am concerned with formulating universal truths and try my best to teach them in class lectures, I attempt to help individual student find an answer that was suitable to him/her individually. 

I have learned from Socrates to ask a series of factual questions in such a way as to thoroughly test students’ knowledge of a subject. In this way I do mini-lecture and focus on examining the student’s awareness itself. This will also give students freedom of choice and enable them to be active rather than passive in the discussion. I also work specifically on clarifying the students’ responses. I use this Socratic philosophical midwifery to assist my students in bringing forth their own understanding and knowledge about some basic facts or concepts. If their understanding is not clearly organized in their minds, I would be able to use this process of testing to reveal the errors to them and clarify their thoughts. 

I also ask open-ended questions so students can discuss with one another and develop various individual answers. To these open-ended and personal questions, there will be no single right answer. Rather, each person will be allowed to express his/her personal preference, and they can learn from one another and be teachers to each other. I often mix these two types of questions—factual and open-ended-- on my list of discussion questions. 

In order to develop students’ research skills, I pay attention to “modeling” students in doing research. I actually show them the specific skills that I used in doing my

own research, give examples, and lead them into the steps of how to design research questions, conduct data collections and doing data analysis. 

The following Active Learning Credo (expanded from Confucius by Mel Silberman) is a cornerstone in my approach to teaching:

 What I hear, I forget.

 What I hear and see, I remember a little.

 What I hear, see, and ask questions about or discuss with someone else, 

       I begin to understand.

 What I hear, see, discuss, and do, I acquire knowledge and skill.

 What I teach to another, I master.

The art of teaching is the art of learning—to hear, to see, to discuss, and to teach. Having learned from Confucian’s teaching methods, I construct logically sound and clearly organized lectures for students to hear, I use all visual tools to let students see, I stimulate their discussions, and I facilitate them to teach themselves and to teach me. 

The last task is the most difficult one. I try to stimulate my students to teach themselves by require them to do class presentations as the last project. They prepare for the presentations in team setting to learn communication skills and ability to work in team with people from different background. Furthermore, when they do presentations, they are in fact playing a role as a teacher. This is an effective way for them to further develop their research skills, as well as oral presentation skills. My role in this process is to provide the resources and the guidance. I have been asking my students to do presentations many times in the past years and the results were impressive.

Since I am editing a Journal, I have challenged my students to submit their papers for the Journal. As the editor, I shall make every effort to help them revise their papers and help them navigate through the review process. I believe some of the papers will be accepted for publication in the Journal.  I would hope that because of these publications, our sociology majors will be more academic oriented and further motivated to pursuit an career in teaching and research in the field of sociology. They might also earn attention and credits while they apply for graduate programs for further training. In this way, I might be able to do something meaningful to help them excel in their future academic life-- I consider this the most valuable reward for my professional pursuit.

 As an integral part of my teaching, I have spent a considerable among of time developing my advising skills to help my students in their academic pursuit at the College and beyond. I keep my office hours religiously and try my best to create friendly and personable interactions with my students. I take the out-of-classroom relationship very seriously, and I have been particularly pleased to chat with my existing students who discuss with me about their dreams and difficulties and to hear from my former students who share with me the latest progress they have made. As a teacher, my happiest moment is to hear my former students telling me their achievements that are related to in-the-classroom or out-of-classroom experiences they had with me.