Teaching Portfolio

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy, specializing in Chinese and comparative philosophy, with a master’s degree in Chinese philosophy. I have seven semesters of experience as a teaching assistant across a range of undergraduate courses, including moral philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of economics. I have been a TA in large lecture courses (60+ students), smaller classes, and seminars. I am currently the Instructor of Record for Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 103S). Across these roles, I have taught both discussion-based and lecture-based classes, using online learning platforms such as Canvas and Sakai to support student engagement.

My central commitment is to active, student-centered learning that makes the material personally meaningful. At the undergraduate level, I understand philosophy as a set of skills that students learn by doing—through close reading, argument reconstruction, discussion, writing, and questioning. Rather than relying primarily on lectures, I structure my classes around clear learning outcomes and use class time to sustain engagement in ways that are collaborative, organic, and visual. My goal is to create a learning environment that guides students to reflect and to question, and that connects philosophical inquiry to the issues they encounter in their daily lives.

Designing and Planning for Learning Activities

I design courses by first identifying the philosophical knowledge and skills students need to develop. I use surveys at the start of the semester to calibrate the syllabus to an appropriate level of difficulty based on the students' prior exposure to philosophy.

To make my Introduction to Philosophy course more accessible, I organized the course around guiding questions concerning personal identity, the good life, political obligation, and knowledge. This allowed the material to resonate with students' personal and social experiences. Each unit culminated in an application, such as social media, which allowed the students to see abstract theory in familiar contexts. To close the first unit, I had students vote on its final topic. After they chose Buddhism, I collected their questions, which I then structured my lesson around. This approach allowed me to cover necessary topics while presenting the material in a way that responded to their interests and prior knowledge. In general, I try to create assignments with clear instructions and transparent pedagogical purposes, including low-stakes reading responses, presentations, exams, and papers, so that students build from conceptual understanding toward critique and synthesis. To support equity, I build flexibility into assignments—for example, allowing students to choose between analysis of the text or a film—while maintaining consistent standards through shared rubrics. Learning outcomes are made visible on the board at the start of each class so that students understand the day's learning trajectory and focus on what is most important. By beginning each class with questions on the previous lesson's material, I get immediate feedback about their understanding, which allows me to adjust my teaching style or clarify the material before moving ahead.

Teaching and Supporting Student Learning

I structure class time to engage students in philosophical thinking rather than passive reception. For example, a review session for Marx, Nietzsche, Freud involved guiding students in identifying shared themes across thinkers and comparing how each would respond to a similar philosophical problem, rather than treating texts in isolation. I modeled skills such as close reading, and had students practice this before reconvening to compare interpretations and address misunderstandings. To encourage equal participation, I invited contributions from students who have not yet spoken and incorporated their ideas by building on their responses. My experiences show me that students can become quite invested in the material when they can relate it to their own ideas and explore it in a non-hierarchical setting. For What Rules Do We Need?, I collaborated with another TA on a review session in which we reviewed essay writing under time constraints, having students work in small groups to answer questions before reconvening to discuss answers and clarify misconceptions. Student feedback from both classes indicated that these review sessions were particularly helpful for clarifying complex material and for helping students see the material in a new light.

Giving Feedback for Learning

I understand learning as an iterative process of practice, feedback, and revision. As a teaching assistant for Problems in Ethical Theory, I provided formative written feedback on first drafts, focusing on helping students clarify their thesis, engage more deeply with course texts, and develop arguments and objections, rather than correcting surface-level issues. I chose this approach to keep feedback manageable and actionable, so that students new to philosophical writing could focus their attention on the elements that contribute most to a quality paper. My feedback combined earned praise with a short list of priorities, typically identifying three high-impact revisions related to structure, clarity, or argumentation. I tailored comments to students’ individual strengths and writing styles, allowing multiple forms of excellence to emerge across different theses while maintaining consistent standards by aligning my expectations with the professor’s graded examples. I also invited students to follow up on feedback and required them to identify how they had addressed comments in their final drafts. In the final versions, students’ work showed clearer organization and stronger argumentation, reinforcing my view that assessment is most effective when it is focused, actionable, and responsive to learners’ needs.

Supporting and Guiding Learners

I support student learning by building trust and being approachable. I proactively communicate with students who appear to be struggling, sometimes framing this as gathering information rather than correction. For example, when a student missed several low-stakes assignments in a row, I reached out to ask whether the assignment or reading was causing difficulty. This created space for the student to explain her course load, allowed me to clarify expectations, and signaled that support was available. Experiences like this have reinforced my view that effective mentoring depends on communication and on resisting assumptions about students and their circumstances. In my classroom, I built community by having students interview a partner about their interests and personal values and then introduce them to the class. Students identified values such as open-mindedness and leadership. By making students’ values visible and relevant to the learning environment, I aim to foster a sense of belonging and anchor agency in a way that supports confident engagement, particularly in discussions of ethical or political theories. Beyond the classroom, I have supported students through informal mentoring as a teaching assistant for the Duke in Geneva program, accompanying students during site visits to the United Nations, where I modeled intellectual curiosity by asking questions of our guides and the students.

Professional Development

I develop my teaching practice through pedagogical research, feedback, and reflection. Duke's Certificate in College Teaching (CCT) program has been a central influence on my development, which emphasizes evidence-based pedagogy, active learning, backward design, and inclusive teaching. Through engaging with empirical research showing that active learning improves learning outcomes even when students perceive traditional lectures as more effective, I decided to use class time for guided questioning, collaborative activities, and in-class writing, and incorporated modalities such as films and poetry. I now focus on how students process material during class rather than traditional lectures organized around covering content. As an outcome of active learning techniques, I observed that students show fewer signs of disengagement, such as distraction by their laptops. During the CCT program, I designed an asynchronous online lesson structured around Bloom's Taxonomy and received peer feedback on efficacy and level of difficulty, which sharpened by understanding of how to scaffold material for someone new to a topic. I continue to seek resources from experienced teachers, as well as feedback from peers and faculty, revising my materials in response, such as by trimming or adding texts. One of my central development practices is maintaining a lesson plan book, where I journal after each class by recording student reception of the material and evaluate the effectiveness of activities, and then use these observations to adjust future lessons. Through these practices, I align my teaching choices with both evidence and experience.

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy rests on two commitments. The first is that learning is iterative. This commitment shapes my course design as developing understanding across time and through multiple encounters. It also expresses my commitment to equity. Students arrive with different background knowledge, and I respect individual learners by teaching them where they are. The second commitment is to the development of students’ intellectual agency. I aim to help students take responsibility for their own thinking. Clear learning goals, transparency, choice, and opportunities to connect theory to lived experience help to build self-awareness and move students from being spectators to participants in their own intellectual development. Beyond disciplinary knowledge, I hope students gain confidence, ethical maturity, flexible thinking, a capacity for civic engagement, and a willingness to engage with opposing views.

I hope to develop new approaches for teaching pre-Qin Chinese philosophy and neo-Confucianism, and I have begun planning a seminar on comparative human dignity that includes Confucian and African perspectives. These courses would see my teaching and research developing simultaneously. I aim to build on my experiences as a teaching assistant to design my own courses in moral philosophy and the philosophy of economics. As higher education continues to change, I plan to strengthen my ability to design effective online and hybrid courses and to foster interdisciplinary efforts by inviting guest speakers from other departments. I continue to learn by observing experienced instructors and reading research in pedagogy. Finally, I intend to survey students at the end of each course to better understand how studying philosophy influences their short-term academic choices and long-term career goals.

Selected Teaching Experience

Spring 2026

Instructor of Record

Duke University

PHIL 103S: Intro to Philosophy

What makes a life go well? When should we obey authority—or resist it? What does it really mean to know something? Who are we really? To explore these questions, we will read some classic texts from early Western philosophy, contemporary work by philosophers from historically underrepresented backgrounds, and texts from early China and India.

Fall 2025

Teaching Assistant to Dr. Alex Rosenberg

Duke University

POLISCI 106CN: What rules do we need?

This course treats a set of political and philosophical issues that arise from the emergence, design and operation of many social institutions, but especially economic markets and political organizations.

Spring 2024

Teaching Assistant to Dr. David B. Wong

Duke University

PHIL 216: What are the implications of deep moral disagreement for the question of how objective morality is? Deep moral disagreements often involve conflicts over which values have priority. Should we give priority to promoting the greatest possible net good, even if it means sacrificing some for the many? Respecting each person even if that produces less total net good?

Spring 2025

Teaching Assistant to Dr. Henry Pickford

Duke University

GERM 380: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

This course is designed as an introduction to the thought of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud,
quintessentially modern thinkers whose views of self, value and society remain controversial today.

Summer 2023

Teaching Assistant to Dr. Alex Rosenberg

Duke in Geneva

PHIL 237A: Political Philosophy of Globalization

This class provides an introduction to how pro-globalization economics, political institutions and public policy drive economic development policy, lowering transnational barriers to trade, capital movement, and cultural forces, while disrupting national political and economic status quo conditions. The class proceeds to the evaluation of these policies for their effectiveness and the sustainability of their normative foundations in contemporary political philosophy.

Spring 2023

Teaching Assistant to Dr. Jennifer Jhun

PHIL 345: The Philosophy and Methodology of Economics

Duke University