My teaching philosophy centers on fostering a non-hierarchical classroom environment where students are encouraged to challenge one-dimensional readings of texts and cultivate their own informed interpretations. Through structured step-by-step processes, I aim to nurture students into becoming confident writers, emphasizing the importance of formative writing, collaborative learning, and the gradual development of their writerly identity. My goal is to empower students to value and reflect their unique voices in their writing. With six years of experience across various teaching environments, including both offline and online courses, I have honed diverse strategies that promote student autonomy and agency in their writing endeavors. Through low-stakes writing projects and classroom discussion, I help students understand thought-as-writing and writing-as-thought before delving into writing-as-form.

Some of my low stakes writing projects include the use of discussion forums and powerpoints. In each class session, I facilitate opportunities for students to explore diverse perspectives on texts through weekly discussion posts, encouraging them to express ideas freely and build upon each other’s ideas in an open space. Submitted prior to class, these posts allow students to engage in independent thinking, free from immediate influence. During class sessions in my nineteenth-century novel course, for example, students delve deeper into their ideas within the context of the period and the novel, supported by my PowerPoint presentations. Discussion questions at the end of each slide prompt student responses, which are recorded in real-time, ensuring that student contributions are valued and retained.

Moving beyond writing as thought, I prompt students to consider writing-as-form by assigning group presentations where they develop and present a collectively crafted thesis statement, supported by close readings of text passages displayed in their presentations. This approach fosters ownership of the classroom as students lead discussions with their own thesis statements, promoting collaborative close reading presentations.

As an extension of this, empowering students through the real-time documentation of their ideas, I emphasize collaborative writing through the use of google docs in which students write mini body paragraphs together. By working through drafting and revising paragraphs together, students have space to dissect the form of a functional paragraph while also coming to learn how other students make their writerly choices. Students take this foundation, which they present to the class, through several further independent writing stages; through the process of working together to understand form, they also become more adept at becoming helpful peer reviewers.

My teaching is rooted in the concept of scaffolding, through which students gradually develop writing proficiency. By the end of the course, students solidify their ideas through close-reading papers before incorporating secondary sources in their final papers. This gradual approach ensures that students prioritize their own voices and develop confidence in their writerly voice before integrating external influences.

I believe that my role as a teacher is to empower students as writers, fostering an environment where their voices hold utmost importance. As an outcome of my teaching, I aspire for students to value their unique writerly voices as deeply as I have valued their contributions in class, and to see these voices reflected in their writing.

Teaching Philosophy (for Victorian)

In each class I teach, I open up the class with, “why do we read the things that we read? For what purpose?” This very question encapsulates my teaching philosophy centered on recovering the significance of close reading, whilst empowering students to independently think for themselves about the purpose of reading. As a scholar specializing in Victorian studies, I believe that integrating the concept of "reparative reading" into my teaching methods is essential. I borrow the word, “reparative reading,” from Eve Sedgwick’s idea on “hopeful” reading as a means to restore and mend the significance of a text. Instead of discouraging or deconstructing the meaning of a text completely, reparative reading encourages readers to find new perspectives on problematic texts, repairing the fractures in both the text and the reader’s relationship with it. I adapt this methodology into my pedagogy, knowing the problematics of nineteenth century British texts that have ingrained racist and sexist ideology embedded within it. 

My pedagogy serves to restore the significance of reading nineteenth century texts, whilst reconsidering and un-disciplining the Victorian genre. To practice such reparative reading, as a form of pedagogy, I intertwine new ways to do close reading by engaging in new types of experiential learning methods that mend the relationship of the reader and the text by helping students to interact with the author themselves, to take agency in rewriting how their own minoritized bodies (if applicable) can be re-read in Victorian texts in the digital platform, whilst emphasizing traditional methods of reading theoretical contexts to know the existing academic conversation that allows students to acknowledge, repair, and heal problematic aspects of nineteenth century Britain.
One example that reflects this is my course from Fall Semester 2023, entitled, "Cultivating Jane Eyre’s Rhythm," that rethinks racial components of the Victorian novel, Jane Eyre. The class examines how to classically read Jane Eyre in its contribution to Victorian feminism, but also highlights the lack of diverse racial representation, as the novel misrepresents an ethnic minority, Bertha Mason, as monstrous. To expand further on the diversity of racial representation, Re Jane pushes students to re-think the bodies of Asian Americans and ethnic minorities that need to be present in rewritten Victorian novels. As an assignment, I make students do a worksheet on “Reading in the Aftermath: An Asian American Jane Eyre.” The worksheet functions as a way to elaborate or make their own point on the novel whilst critically engaging with a theoretical article. The students pick a specific passage from the article that they agree or disagree with and do their own close reading of the novel, whilst amplifying their own voice, using the “they say/I say” technique. In the “they say” technique, the students succinctly summarize the points of Olivia Loksing Moy’s article on reiterating third wave feminist ideas that are not represented in Jane Eyre, whilst making their own points in the “I say,” portion on how it is reflected in Re Jane by their own close readings. I believe it is crucial to understand the importance of reading theoretical texts in order to help students see the existing academic conversation, whilst cultivating their own voice in their papers. 

Extending beyond the classical form of teaching and re-reading novels in the classroom, I also incorporate experiential learning by formulating events in which students can actually meet the author to truly “re-read” the nineteenth century, in person. Last semester, I hosted an online public event with novelist Patricia Park in affiliation with the Department of English entitled,  “Cultivating Jane Eyre’s Rhythm with Patricia Park’s Re Jane.” As my teaching methodology is to develop the individuality and creativity of students, the event mostly consisted of students actively asking questions to Patricia Park, whose novel is a contemporary rewriting of Jane Eyre. I compiled their questions prior to the event in a google doc, but also encouraged them to ask questions during the session. By having their background knowledge of reparative reading in mind, students asked questions such that interlinked contemporary society to Victorian novels, “have you ever struggled with uncertain identities, culturally and racially like Re Jane,” or “of all the Victorian era, why did she choose Jane Eyre to represent Korean-American culture?”

Feedback from students regarding the course and the event made me believe that such experiential learning practices are beneficial to their learning. A student wrote in a google feedback form that the course was effective because they “appreciate[d] the way we got to learn from Re Jane, (after understanding the original Jane Eyre), both in understanding the Korean and American cultural aspects and the way we can, in a modern setting, reassess themes from the Victorian era. The incorporation of and focus on the novel, Re Jane, in your curriculum helped to lend a fresh, diverse and informative perspective on similar content, and our talk with Patricia Park helped to bring the academic theories into our real, personal experiences.” Taking in the students’ feedback, I reflected that experiential learning in reassessing the Victorian era was beneficial, and decided to further develop an assignment that interactive engages with the text.

In order to do this, I have created a digital assignment, “Re-mapping & Re-telling Assignment: Exploring Ethnic Minority Representations in Jane Eyre adaptations.” This assignment allows students to visually reconceptualize the Victorian period by modern adaptations, whilst thinking of highlighting under-represented minority groups. The digital assignment asks students to create their own storyboard, storymap, or timeline to highlight the significance of ethnic/racial minorities that were not represented in past Victorian novels, specifically Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea or Patricia Park’s Re Jane. They select an ethnic minority that they think were not highlighted, research historical context that they can point out in a digitized platform. Through the assignment, I aim for students to reread and revisualize how the Victorian novel is beneficial to understandings of feminism embedded in Jane Eyre, but does not consider the ethnic minorities. As a pedagogical example, I will display my digital project,  “Riding Jane Eyre’s Stagecoach Rhythm in Jane Re’s New York Subway,” to my students which will also soon be published as an article.

Regardless of if it's a Victorian course or not, one thing that remains consistent in all my courses is the pressure I put on close reading. With the use of  powerpoints, I give students a historical context of the novel, show an overview of theoretical readings that have been done on the text, and finally display picked passages that have leading discussion questions. Most recently, when I was substituting for a senior seminar on Jane Austen, I used powerpoint slides to dissect the impact of Darcy's letter on Elizabeth, guiding students through a close reading process slide by slide. Each slide features highlighted passages linked to discussion questions, with student responses documented in real-time. Many students have written in their evaluations that they appreciated this teaching technique, because it made them feel that their ideas mattered.

My aspiration is that each student ends my class with thinking at least a bit differently about one aspect of literature. One student noted in my feedback that my class contributed to their understanding of common themes in literature such as “perceived gender roles, educational systems . . . and how we can learn from the way societal beliefs encourage certain ways of treating ourselves, others, and the treatment we accept from others.” And such feedback has made me want to continue to impact students’ understandings of not just literature, but also how best we want to treat ourselves, and other people in the world - despite any type of difference.