Teaching Experience and Interests
Instructor: GEOG 1700—World Regional Geography (Spring 2011)
Course Description:
I taught “World Regional Geography” at the University of Connecticut for one semester. It is a 3 credit course under the category of general education. There were around 40 students enrolled, with a variety of majors. It was the first time I taught a full course independently in English, and in retrospect it was a great experience. I generally had good interactions with the students throughout the course and most of them showed good learning results. The most encouraging part is when some students told me they would not know it was my first time teaching if I had not told them. I think this introduction to independent teaching gave me a good foothold from which I can continue to improve; but at the same time, I also felt a sense of achievement as an instructor and I am determined to make college teaching a major focus of my academic career. The syllabus below contains the objectives, structure, and contents of this course.
Sample Syllabus:
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Formal Strudent Evaluation:
Click to open the standard student evaluation for the course
Informal Student Responses:
After the course I sent e-mails to a random group of students to ask for their feedback about their learning and my teaching during the whole semester in order to obtain valuable information to benefit my future teaching. Most students found the materials in the course interesting and had the desire to learn more about different places, cultures, and people near and far. They liked my small talk before class that usually helped them relax and also get their attention before lecture. Some students felt I talked too fast and sometimes tried to feed too much information in a limited time. This is what I will work on - how to manage time and the pace of the lecture. Part of the problem may be related to my being nervous since it was the first time I taught a course. I am positive it will be better as my experience accumulates. A related aspect is I need to insert some mental breaks during the class to help students digest what they just learned and regain their attention. They could be a short question or a little story related to the content. Furthermore, one student encouraged me to include more multimedia into the class, such as audios, videos, and interactive web sites related to classroom materials. So now I am always aware of collecting pieces of interesting and useful materials that would help me bring more media into the classroom. In summary, looking for direct feedback from students has been a major element in my instructional development. While I am glad to hear encouraging words about how my students learn well from the course, I also welcome critics who from whom I can learn.
Working as Teaching Assistant for Multiple Courses
From 2008 to 2011, I worked as a teaching assistant in Geography Department at University of Connecticut. I helped in a wide range of undergraduate courses including Introduction to Geography, World Regional Geography, Physical Geography, Globalization, GIS Modeling of Environment Change, Spatial Data Analysis, and Cartography. Thanks to the diversity of subjects, I have learned from a variety of experienced professors rich subject knowledge, useful teaching skills, and how to interact with students effectively.
My work usually included preparing course materials, grading homework and exams, answering student questions during office hours, leading GIS labs, and helping students with projects. Occasionally I gave lectures, usually because the instructor missed the class for some reasons. This TA experience has laid a solid foundation for me to become a college teacher. During my first time teaching as an independent instructor, whenever I met some problems, I looked back to my TA experience for potential solutions and most of the time I could find a good one. In retrospect, I really enjoyed my TA experience and have been grateful to those warm-hearted professors who helped me greatly in personal development.
Current Teaching Interests
World Regional Geography:
This is the course I have taught before and I will be glad to continue to teach. The most attractive part of this course is that the world has been changing fast and as an instructor I have to keep learning and upgrading my teaching content and practices to meet the demands of the situation. This is both challenging and exciting. Making students aware of the dynamic nature of the world is one of the major goals of the course. Another challenge of world geography is that the calendar length of the course is too short to cover so many places, stories, and concepts that could be covered–a life time may not be long enough.
Above all a successful course should have a substantial and sustained impact on students long after they finish the course. In addition, world geography is full of topics–physical environment, climate, economic development, culture, etc.–that makes it very suitable for developing advanced thinking skills, such as historical, critical, and practical thinking, in the context of different places of the world. I think of the course as a lighthouse that guides the students on the ocean of geographic knowledge. For so many reasons, I always feel passionate and excited to teach world regional geography.
GIS Courses:
GIS is at the center stage of the curriculum in many geography departments in the United States. As a technology that greatly enables the potential and possibilities of spatial thought and spatial analysis, GIS now can be found in classrooms, offices, labs, websites, and even personal devices. General students from outside of geography certainly benefit from taking human and physical geography courses, but GIS especially helps build high level thinking and practical skills and improves the student&srquo;s employability greatly. In today’s highly competitive job market, acquiring GIS skills definitely gives students an edge to succeed.
On the other hand, I feel GIS technology actually is very fun to play with, and I hope I can transfer this enthusiasm to students along with the concepts and skills, because falling in love with something new is a major step toward learning it well. As for the content of the course, I am confident teaching basic and advanced GIS, spatial analysis, model building and some programming. I am becoming more and more interested in web GIS technology, combining GIS server, web server, and web clients. I hope someday I can teach a course introducing how to build GIS web applications that will be both interesting and useful.
Topics Related to China
Although I am always enthusiastic about different places in the world and teaching about them, China is still the area I know the most. Since I was born in China and lived and travelled around for more than twenty years, I would like to tell people what I have learned from books and personal experiences about this old but also new country. Therefore, if I have a chance I would like to develop and teach a course related to China, its geography, history, recent economic development and urbanization, and the many problems that emerged during this process. I think a comprehensive course introducing different aspects of this country will greatly benefit students from a variety of backgrounds and enrich the curriculum of geography and related departments in any higher education institution.
Other Interests
My other teaching interests include topics related to economic geography, development and urban and regional planning. The question why some places grow better than others always fascinates me, and led me into the field of economic geography. This problem involves a wide range of interconnected variables–natural resource endowments, labor, capital, human capital, technology, trade and investment, government, and of course, location. I would be glad to teach this topic and it will also help the students better understanding the world around them. My undergraduate major is urban and regional planning and I still love planning, especially the use of GIS in this field, so I would be happy to teach it as well.