Teaching

The key to teaching effectively is the creation of classroom as a safe space with mutual respect, enabled by careful community building. I have always appreciated the classroom dynamics that permit exchangeable dialogue and knowledge co-production located within the triangulation of students, teacher, and course materials in and beyond the classroom. 

I understand my own teaching as a community-based, public practice. Through class discussion, step-by-step scaffolding, and portfolio-building processes, I get the opportunity to place my research, teaching, curating, film criticism, and previous journalistic experiences into an organic, long-term dialogue called public scholarship. 

My pedagogical approach that encourages students’ interaction and collaboration grows out of my commitment to arming students with critical thinking toolkits. I do so in a conscious way that prepares students to confidently apply their study of media form, theory, and history to any object of analysis in other courses and also beyond academic pursuits.

A selection of courses I taught:

CMS 397 Cinema on Trial: Courtroom and Global Film History

This is a course I designed and taught at UW Seattle. The course explores films and images that take trials as the central theme, as well as the role of cinematic medium plays in producing trial-like encounters that render the condemned visible, make/execute the truth, and put spectators on trial. It intends to inspire students to rethink the aesthetical, social and ethical power of cinema, as a response to the global constant reasoning, arguing, and struggling about the adequate and legitimate images of atrocity and violence in the era of conflict and witness.

CINE429U/CHIN418N Chinese Cinemas and the Underground (University of Maryland, College Park)

This course digs into the hidden world of film and media across PRC China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other diasporic Sinophone areas. Issues tobe explored include cinema's relationship to the Chinese Hell, revolutionary espionage, and tunnel warfare, as well as guerilla filmmaking, media piracy, subversive data mining, and forms of secret voices, forbidden images, and unofficial memories. Taught in English.

CLIT 240 In the Mood for Cinema: Love in/and East Asia

This is a course I designed and taught, concerning cine-love, namely, various films of love and the love of cinema in East Asian entities: South Korea, Japan, Mainland China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In this course, students learn to explore, execute, utilize, and also reflect on the interrelated power of both written and visual language through the medium of film analysis. This course covers a multitude of cultural artifacts including fiction films such as In the Mood for Love (2000), Goodbye Dragon Inn (2003), Miss Granny (2014), and Farewell My Concubine (1993); animated film such as Millennium Actress (2001); video essays and shorts such as Movie Night (2007). Those different texts around cinema and moviegoing serve as an immersive setting for students’ writing adventure as well as function as a toolbox of living archives with which their writing will deal and interact.

CINE429V/CHIN418V Chinese Machines, Global Media (University of Maryland, College Park)

This course explores the working of Chinese machines as both a local reality and a global media form: how various machines - trains, cameras, computers, drones, robots, and more - function as technological artifacts, media practices, and social apparatuses in the Chinese-speaking world and beyond. Topics include WeChat, databases, sex cyborgs, virtual idols, pandemic tech, and A.I. systems. Introduces students to a wide array of films, animation, video games, digital ephemera, internet memes, and social media events from PRC China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and across the Asia Pacific.

CINE429/CHIN418 Where Truth Lies: Cinema Between Fact and Fiction (University of Maryland, College Park)

This course explores Chinese/Sinophone films and media that unsettle the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Course materials under discussion draw on a variety of genres, forms, and approaches: reportage, mockumentary, docudrama, found footage, true crime series, crowd-sourced video remix, filmed reenactments, essay film and ephemeral media of various kinds, etc.

ENGL131 Childhood, Color, Cinema (UW Seattle)

This course I designed and taught explores childhood and color within and across multiple forms of frame—picture frame, screen, and virtual window—and also as an invention forged from a potent relationship between ideas and technologies framed by social, political, and economic needs. Using images from various films and other visual sources, the aim of this course is to prepare students, with analytical skills, to start an adventure in writing through the lens of childhood/color. We read texts around cinema of childhood and take a close look at visual texts about color and/or childhood, ranging from Victorian painting to political/film poster, from international press photo to testimonial cartoon, from classic film still to exploration game, from hand-drawn anime to activist installation video, associated with cinematic art. Childhood/color serves as a viewfinder of historical, socio-cultural reality and motivate students’ investigation of writing based on critical thinking and supportive evidence.

CMS 302 Cell Phone Cultures (UW Seattle)

This course analyzes the aesthetics, politics, protocols, history, and theory of intermedial cell phone cultures. In this course, the cell phone is understood as a technological device whose cultural, social, and economic significance serves as a key indicator of the structures of contemporary society. After beginning with some foundational studies of the cell phone’s precursors, we examine contemporary histories and analyses of the cell phone and cell phone cultures.