Xiaojing Zhou
PhD, Department of English, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada, 1995
MA, Department of English, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 1989
BA, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Shandong University, China, 1974
I believe in student-centered learning. As an instructor, I consider my role similar to that of a聽dance instructor. While inspiring students to continually extend and deepen their understanding聽of the subject being studied, and enabling them to develop their abilities, discover their聽potentials, and master essential skills are basic to the dance instructor's work, it is equally聽important to model the kind of performance expected, and demonstrate how to achieve it.
In my classroom as in a dance studio, individual learning is inseparable from cultivating an聽awareness and responsiveness to others' talents and strengths through interactive learning. Basic聽to this collaborative approach is a reliance on shared inquiry that emerges from students' own聽interests and motivations. For me in teaching there is no experience more rewarding than聽witnessing students taking delight in working together on how to excel as learners.
But teaching entails much more than coaching methods or modeling performance. Its content and聽pedagogy must adapt to the changing world and new scholarship and scientific discoveries. Thus聽teaching must be constantly renewed, invigorated through the instructor's active research so that聽learning will be relevant, exciting, inspiring, and empowering to students.
My scholarly interests grow out of my study of what is new in literature, history, and critical聽theories, which expand my horizon and compel me to confront the silenced, the marginalized,聽the overlooked, and the blind spots in existing scholarship in my field. Hence my scholarly聽interests develop with my discoveries through readings and research projects, which often lead to聽unexpected new areas of critical investigation and creativity.
Currently, one of my research project focuses on writings by Japanese Americans about their聽mass incarceration during World War II, as counter-narratives of the frontier myth which was聽reinvented by the War Relocation Authority in the ten incarceration camps, several of which聽were located on Native American reservations and the federal reclamation land. Another current聽research project examines the agency of literature by women and ethnic minorities for addressing聽ecological crises and environmental in(justice) issues.
