While I was working as an assistant language teacher for the JET Program, I was asked by a Kyoto Women’s University professor to put together a 60-minute guest lecture for his “US History and Race” course.
My challenge was to design an interactive activity for Japanese English-learners that was both engaging, informative, and at an appropriate level of English difficulty.
This has been, to date, one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on!
Overview
Christopher Garth, English Program Coordinator at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities, connected me with Fuyuhiko Shimomura, an English professor at Kyoto Women’s University. He was seeking a guest lecturer for his course, “US History and Race”, in which a person of color would share their race-related experience with his Japanese students.
I was very excited to participate in this opportunity, but of course, it presented a few challenges. The presentation had to be at a level of English that the students could follow, but also accurately and earnestly depict my experience with race in America. I had to come up with a learning experience that would strike the perfect balance between simple and complex.
The Situation: How can I build a 60-minute, one-time lecture for Japanese students that paints an accurate picture of race and racism in the United States?
Duration of project: 2 months
Audience: Undergraduate Japanese students of English
Format: In-person workshop, PowerPoint Quiz
My Role: While I developed the learning experience, script, and materials independently, I coordinated with Professor Shimomura frequently to determine the needs of his students.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design (Higher Ed), eLearning Development
Technologies Used: Google Slides, Microsoft Powerpoint, YouTube
I was in dire need of a portfolio website (much like this one!) and I couldn’t find templates that felt like they expressed my personality. I had just finished a course on front-end web development, and I wanted to make a website that showcased my HTML/CSS/Javascript capabilities. I was also interested in exploring the UI/UX decisions that surround web development, so I decided to make a project out of it and document the process!
My Role
I coded the theme for this website every step of the way. I used a Udemy course to learn how to create WordPress templates, and from there I came up with a wireframe putting e-ink to “paper”, designed a prototype using Adobe XD, got recommendations and advice from friends/family on the UI/UX elements of the design, coded them in HTML and CSS, and restructured the code to use PHP templates instead of static HTML. Finally, I uploaded my new theme to WordPress, and you’re looking at it right now!
The Process
Before starting anything, I mapped out how I wanted the process to go, really letting my educator side shine. My thinking was, in order to learn how to do this properly, I probably wouldn’t learn very well if I just struggled through the process once and never looked at it again. So, I created a six-step process that would ensure that my learning would happen on a deeper level.
First, I would set up a local development environment, where I could mess around with the code as much as I wanted and see the changes immediately without having to put anything online for the world to see.
Next, I would create the plan for a website theme that would be intentionally ugly, but functional, to motivate me to do the process again (and better the second time).
Third, I would create a Git repository before coding anything, so that I could track changes (and potentially have other coders lend a hand).
Fourth, I would finally put the ugly website on the web, maing sure everything worked properly, and lletting the embarrassment propel me through the final two steps.
Fifth, I would design a website that I was more proud of, using UX and UI principles to make the design look clean and aesthetically pleasing.
Finally, I would commit those changes to Git, and put the new theme on the web.
You can see more about my plan in this blog post.
Step 1
In this step, I used Local by Flywheel to set up a local dev environment, and I got familiarized with the WordPress interface. Read more about this process in this blog post.
Step 2
In this step, I created a wireframe using my reMarkable (highly recommended product, by the way!) and cycled through a few designs that I thought would be appropriate, yet ugly. See how I did it here.
Step 3
In this next step, I realized that I had been following instructions for a project I didn’t know that I was doing, and I switched courses. I learned that part of being a web developer is understanding what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. Hear more about this realization here. (I also succesfully Git committed in the process!)
Step 4
In step 4, I finally got my website on the web! It required a lot of templating and PHP. Take a look at how that works here.
Step 5 & 6
I was in the middle of finishing up a year in grad school, so these two steps were delayed quite a bit – but when they happened, they happened quickly. Read the conclusion to this series here!
Final Result
Step ∞ – As you might’ve noticed, the current design for my website is different from both the ugly and beautiful versions featured in my blog posts. That’s because I’m constantly changing and updating with new themes.
This particular theme is called “Colorful Ed-Tech”. It uses the Underscores framework to streamline some processes (such as making grids and buttons). Below, I’ve included a gallery on some past WordPress themes I’ve created.
If you want to give me some advice on how the website looks at the moment, please visit my about me page and drop me a comment!
After returning from Japan to the US due to Covid, I didn’t want to lose my language skills. So, I started a freelance tutoring business for teaching both Mandarin and Japanese.
The new need for virtual tutoring and eLearning materials sped up my proficiency with tools such as Google Slides, Zoom, and Quizlet. This undertaking also jump-started my interest in motivational theory, and the specifics of linguistic and cultural learning.
Overview
I studied abroad in China in the 11th grade, and lived in Japan for 2.5 years after graduating from college. In the effort not to lose my language skills and make some side cash, I thought it would be a great idea to start tutoring both Mandarin and Chinese.
To do so, I was introduced to a variety of authoring tools and technologies to facilitate the tutoring process. I also wanted to tailor each learning experience to each learner as much as possible, to see if it would facilitate learning. This, of course, required me to become deeply familiar with the ADDIE process, conduct formative and summative evaluations, collect feedback, and iterate with each lesson.
I had two students, both in their 20s, who I taught over the course of once year. I am very grateful to them for investing their time and money in my growth as a tutor, eLearning developer, and instructional designer!
The Situation: How can I author and deliver eLearning experiences for Chinese and Japanese tutoring?
Duration of project: 1 year
Audience: American learners of Chinese and Japanese
Format: Zoom meetings
My Role: I independently developed and delivered the materials for these tutoring courses.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design, Language education, Tutoring, eLearning Development
Technologies Used: Zoom, Google Slides, Google Docs, Quizlet
Civic Spirit is an interfaith organization that collaborates with high schools to develop programming to foster civic engagement, belonging, and community.
I participated in this organization as a Student Program Manager, facilitating three projects. It required several different perspectives on instructional design, as the participants on each project had different needs and goals.
Overall, it was a wonderful experience that I wish I had experienced as a teen growing up in NYC!
Overview
In February of 2022, I joined the team at Civic Spirit, a small non-profit organization focused on bringing together students of different faiths together under a common goal of civic engagement. I was brought on to lead three different projects – The Evergreen Alliance, a group of Muslim and Jewish high-schoolers working to make a positive environmental impact on their city, The Civic Spirit Action Committee, made up of high-school students learning to make issue briefs for their community stakeholders, and the Civic Spirit Staff, brought together every month for team-building and professional development workshops.
While I developed and facilitated learning experiences for each of these three projects, the one I will be focusing on is the Civic Spirit All-Staff Meetings, as they best demonstrate adult learning techiques.
Situation: How can I support the work of the Civic Spirit Staff in their various roles, encourage them learn more about each other, and bring insights from my own work?
Duration of project: 5 months
Audience: Civic Spirit staff members, all educational enthusiasts, with a variety of roles in the organization
My Role: While I created the materials each month independently, I had lots of help from Lindsay Bressman, the executive director, in understanding the needs of team members and the parameters of each meeting.
Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) Summer Bridge is a program funded by the NYC Department of Youth & Community Development, in collaboration with Sesame Flyers International Inc and Workforce Connect.
The program aims to build professional skills in youth through employment and community engagement activities. I worked as a Program Facilitator in this program in the summer of 2020, the program’s first virtual iteration.
Overview
In the summer of 2020, I learned about Sesame Flyers Inc., a small organization that connected youth in Brooklyn to opportunities for community engagement and summer employment. I joined as a Program Facilitator, which meant that I would be taking the outline of a 5-week professional development program and adapting it to a learning experience that was completely virtual, due to Covid restrictions.
I carefully examined the scope and sequence of the course, which was designed to follow a set of activities students could complete in an app called Hats & Ladders. The course adaptation called for making each learning objective uniquely engaging and memorable, using technologies such as Padlet, Slack, and Zoom features.
The Situation: How can I adapt a 5-week in-person professional development course for middle schoolers to a virtual environment?
Duration of project: 2 months
Audience: Students ages 11-14 seeking summer employment and professional skills
Format: Zoom workshops, Google Classroom, Slack
My Role: I led a class of 24 students through the 5-week program, in collaboration with fellow Program Facilitators.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design (K-12), Program Facilitation, eLearning Development
Technologies Used: Google Slides, Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Classroom, YouTube, Hats & Ladders (app), Slack, Padlet
Course Mapping
My first step was to adapt the scope and sequence provided by Summer Bridge to a virtual format, combining Zoom workshops with activities from the Hats & Ladders App and daily and weekly written deliverables to ensure that each course goal was fulfilled.
Curating Learning Resources
The students in each class were responsible for a final deliverable demonstrating their learnings in community engagement. My job was to provide them with the training and resources necessary to accomplish this long-term goal. Here, you can see an activity I facilitated on Padlet to help the students brainstorm about their community engagement project.
Project Role Delegation
My class decided to make an informative YouTube video on the warning signs of domestic abuse. I split the class into teams, and gave each team a title according to their role in the project. Those teams were the “Creative” team, the “Research” team, and the “Strategy” team. Within each team, students were responsible for meeting course requirements and delegating tasks. I also encouraged the students to think about how the teams they chose related to their professional goals.
Final Deliverable
While I was responsible for the success of the 5-week program, the students themselves were responsible for the most impressive part of this project. You can take a look at the video they researched for, scripted, recorded, and edited all on their own!
Final Result
Look below to see an example of a virtual session I facilitated during the SYEP Summer Bridge course!
The Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, or JET Program, is a government-sponsored organization which connects English-speakers to teaching opportunities in Japan. I spent almost three years in Taga, a rural town in the Shiga Prefecture of western Japan.
As a JET teacher, you participate in two annual Skills Development Conferences (SDCs) with the other teachers in your prefecture.
Being in Japan has shaped who I am today, and has truly grown me as an educator and traveler.
Overview
As a JET Program Assistant Language Teacher (ALT), you teach English alongside a Japanese Teacher of English (JTE) in the classroom. ALTs and JTEs both convene for one conference a year for professional development and learning more effective teaching strategies.
As ALTs, we can propose a topic for one of these conferences, and if accepted, we speak in front of a room of other ALTs (and possibly JTEs) about a topic of our choosing. I saw an opportunity to introduce the concept of intercultural competence to my peers, so I proposed a workshop with the title “Using Intercultural Competence Theory to Engage with Race and Identity”.
The Situation: How can non-Japanese teachers of English use intercultural competence to be more effective and culturally sensitive educators?
Duration of project: 4 months
Audience: Adult English teachers from various countries, living as expats in Japan
Format: In-person workshop
My Role: I put together this presentation independently, with feedback from my peers.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design, Corporate Training
Technologies Used: Google Slides, Microsoft Powerpoint, YouTube
In fall 2021, at the beginning of my Master’s program at Harvard Graduate School of Education, a few classmates and I got together to create a student organization called Throughline. Its goal was to be a space where people could practice effective communication strategies and have more conversations with “the opposition”.
The conversations I had during Throughline events and in planning with my teammates were absolutely enlightening, and I hope to bring another iteration of this project wherever I go next!
Overview
At the very beginning of the fall semester at Harvard Graduate School of Education, classmate Tahmid Islam and I discussed creating a student organization. It took many different forms at first, but after some refining and feedback from our peers, we finally came up with Throughline. Its tagline: “Understanding Across Differences”.
Throughout its course, we held three conferences on effective communication strategies, the art of negotiation, and the power of disengaging opposition, among other topics. It came at a time when America was transitioning from a Trump to a Biden presidency, and students expressed a need to genuinely understand those who held different political, ideological, and philosophical views from their own.
The Situation: How can we have more effective conversations with our peers?
Duration of project: 4 months
Audience: Harvard Graduate School of Education students, Harvard University students
Format: In-person & hybrid workshops
My Role: I was a co-founder of the group, and the executive team was made up of 9 people with roles such as Advertising, Program Planning, and Outreach.
Out of Eden Learn is a Project Zero initiative that brings students from all over the world onto one platform.
The initiative is in collaboration with Paul Salopek, a National Geographic journalist taking a journey across the globe – a project called Out of Eden Walk.
I had the opportunity to present a workshop to the Out of Eden Learn team in June 2022 on intercultural communication (ICC) and ethnic-racial identity (ERI).
Overview
In my final semester at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), I worked with professors Liz Dawes Duraisingh and Bruno della Chiesa on an independent study on intercultural communication. At the same time, I was in a course taught by Professor Kristia Wantchekon on ethnic-racial identity. I proposed to Liz that not only was there an important connection to be made between these two concepts, but that further knowledge of the frameworks they provided for education would be useful to Liz’s project, Out of Eden Learn.
Out of Eden Learn (OOEL) is a grant-funded research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in collaboration with journalist Paul Salopek as he embarks on a journey across the world by foot. This journey, which he calls Out of Eden Walk, uses a technique Paul calls “slow journalism”, a departure from the fast-paced journalism we typically see. His daily conversations, adventures, and challenges walking across the world also provide rich educational value, thus the creation of Out of Eden Learn – an online platform which brings K-12 students together to participate in cross-cultural communication, story-sharing, and activities centered around the philosophy of slow looking.
As I got more involved with this project, I saw a critical opportunity to introduce the value of ICC and ERI to the Out of Eden Learn team.
The Situation: What are intercultural communication and ethnic-racial identity? Why are these concepts important, and why should our organization incorporate them into our research?
Duration of project: 1 month
Audience: Harvard Graduate School of Education professors and principal investigators of a research project
Format: Zoom workshop
My Role: I independently carried out the research and implementation of this workshop, with guidance from Liz Dawes Duraisingh, principal investigator and co-director of Out of Eden Learn.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design, Consulting, Design Thinking, UX Research
Technologies Used: Google Slides, Microsoft Powerpoint, Canva
The Process
I used the design thinking model to guide this project, consulting with the OOEL team to determine their needs and goals. Because I was evaluating an online platform, my process was done in relation to suggestions for improvement of the platform’s design, as well as the content on the platform.
Empathize Stage
My first step was to empathize with the OOEL team and understand their needs deeply. The platform uses articles by Paul Salopek to expose learners to the practice of “slow journalism”, or making deep observations that lead to even deeper insights about the world we live in.
I spent some time consuming the literature, videos, and other content produced by Paul Salopek and OOEL. I learned about the participants of the project, and some of the most valuable insights that both students and educators have gained during their time on the program. I also conducted interviews with the principal investigators at OOEL, understanding more about what they experienced in their progress to address issues of racial inequity.
Define Stage
I was given access to the backend of the OOEL platform to observe student submissions. In this part of the process, I became intimately familiar with OOEL’s model.
An educator signs their class up for a particular “learning journey”, or curriculum, topics for which range from planetary health to migration.
Each learning journey is split into either 4 or 6 footsteps, milestones in each curriculum after which students produce a deliverable, which demonstrates both their understanding of the content and their ability to use slow looking to engage deeply with it.
To define the problem, I used my research in ICC and ERI to record my observations of students’ responses using those ideological lenses.
Ideate Stage
I used the lenses of ICC and ERI to brainstorm some potential solutions to the problems I identified.
For example, this picture represents my use of ERI to identify that most OOEL students are in a critical stage of identity vs. role confusion. I based my suggestions on that understanding.
I continued to engage with the OOEL team to learn about some problems they’ve observed, and how they’ve traditionally gone about addressing them. It was important to remain open during this step so that I could remain empathetic to their perspectives through the process, and understand whether the suggestions I’d propose were viable.
Prototype Stage
In this stage, I used the observations I generated in the ideate stage to produce some concrete solutions. I connected each solution to an ERI or ICC principle (or both), explaining how the implementation of these suggestions might result in a change of a particular measurable outcome.
This part of the process was exciting, because I got to see how my academic understanding could be applied to a real-world situation that could benefit from these suggestions. I’m very grateful to the OOEL team for working with me on this project!
Test Stage
A note: Because OOEL remained under certain contractual obligations, we were not able to implement a test of the features I recommended, however the team was very receptive and enthusiastic to test them out in the future, when this was not the case.
My ideal scenario would be to test out some of these suggestions, and see whether or not they produced a change in the areas I observed (i.e. the measurable intercultural competence measures provided by Byram (1997) and higher levels of various ERI exploration). Then I would iterate on the changes, in collaboration with the OOEL team.
Final Result
I held a workshop/discussion with the OOEL team on June 30th, 2022. Check out the Google Slides presentation below!
CLan (or, Culture + Language), is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) my classmates and I designed in my Master’s program. We created a prototype intended to improve language learning outcomes in teens through an engaging online experience.
It took a while to develop, but was a lot of fun as well!
Overview
This project was developed in a course called “Innovation by Design”, with Professor David Dockterman at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We were all tasked with choosing a problem that we found important, and working through the design of a solution using the design thinking methodology.
My teammates and I decided to focus on second language acquisition, because we all have a background in it. Throughout the course of the semester, we developed a prototype for an app called “CLan” (Culture + Language).
The Situation: How can we best improve second language acquisition in teens by developing their linguistic and cultural skills simulatenously?
Duration of project: 4 months
Audience: Middle school (11-14 year old) language learners
Format: Mobile app
My Role: I was on a team of 3 other Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) students. We each played a significant role in interviewing, ideating, testing/building prototypes, and refining this project.
Our very first step was to get at the root of the problem and empathize with its stakeholders. Professor Dockterman’s favorite phrase in class was, “Fall in love with the problem!” So, we did tons of research.
We conducted 10 interviews with language teachers, read many peer-reviewed journal articles, and held many more informal interviews with people our age and younger. There are links to these interviews on this Miro Board.
Problem Statement
Eventually, this research led us to better define our Problem Statement:
A lot of students are exposed to multiple Integrated Language and Culture (ILC) experiences, but they can’t necessarily make sense of them (i.e., observe the connection between language and culture AND the connection between these ILC experiences and themselves). Therefore, they are not interested and engaged in the learning process and they don’t retain the knowledge.
There were many intermediary steps of our analysis process, but a few I want to highlight are our Theory of Action and our “How Might We…?” Statement.
Theory of Action
Our Theory of Action illustrated the chain of events we argued would occur as a result of our intervention. It was intended to better orient us towards our desired goal. To create a Theory of Action, we followed an “If… then… so that” format.
Theory of Action
“How Might We…?” Statement
Our next step was to define the objectives we needed to create in order to move towards this goal, and that was done via our “How Might We…?” Statement. The “How Might We…?” Statement was a crucial starting point for the design and brainstorming portion of our project. After numerous design sprints, we moved on to designing a solution that would address all three of these points.
“How Might We..?” Statement
Design + Development
After a lengthy brainstorming process, my teammates and I each came up with a storyboard for our learning solution. We knew that several features of our solution, such as avatar creation and self-reflection, would guide the learning process and increase motivation for our middle school learners. We also knew that an online app would be a good medium for our solution, because apps allow for many of the features we had in mind (social media interaction, avatar creation, voice recording, etc.)
Iteration
As any design process does, our app design went through many iterations, with lots of feedback from Professor Dockterman’s teaching team and our classmates. In fact, we cycled through the entire design thinking process several times before our final product.
Our Round 2 storyboard process incorporated considerations from our Theory of Action and “How Might We…?” Statement.
Our Round 3 storyboard process was created using user feedback from our MVP process, and expert advice from our mentors.
Round 4 integrated the insights from our previous rounds, incorporating some UX design principles for easier navigability.
Implementation
We came up with a few Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) for our design, which we used to test for certain outcomes.
First, we used Quizlet to develop flashcards for a few Chinese words. Then, we administered the quiz to a few non-Chinese speaking participants.
We then re-administered the quiz with some cultural context, testing to see if they retained more information with more context. Surprise, surprise — they did!
MVP – Second round
We then came up with a scenario-based MVP where participants were given a cultural challenge, to see if the dilemma increased their motivation to learn more about the language. Of course, we determined specific measurements and values for the impacts we were measuring.
Evaluation
Back in the Analysis stage, we spent a lot of time defining our constructs.Constructs are specific, measurable, and well-defined terminology that we used throughout our project’s development. Below, you can see a map of some of these constructs and how they fit together.
These constructs were vital in helping us measure whether or not our solution was having its intended impact. Each of our MVPs measured a different construct, and whether or not a change in value of one construct affected another construct in the ways we predicted.
Additionally, at every step of our process, we recieved plenty of rich feedback on our MVPs, Theory of Action, and “How Might We…?” Statement. At the end of the course, we presented our “final product” (it will always be in development!), and received feedback on the presentation at all, which gave us the motivation to go back to the drawing board each time.
Final Result
Of course, we cycled through the design thinking process a few times, coming up with a few different iterations on the app after further research:
Here’s the final design of our app:
At the end of the course, we presented a 3-minute video with a full explanation of our product design! We used Adobe Premiere Pro to create the video, and PowerPoint and AdobeXD as supplementary tools for our visuals.
Thanks for reading!
Pictured: Team SLA (CLan), Professor Dockterman, and Lisa Radden (our mentor!)
While I was working as an assistant language teacher for the JET Program, I was asked by a Kyoto Women’s University professor to put together a 60-minute guest lecture for his “US History and Race” course.
My challenge was to design an interactive activity for Japanese English-learners that was both engaging, informative, and at an appropriate level of English difficulty.
This has been, to date, one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on!
Overview
Christopher Garth, English Program Coordinator at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities, connected me with Fuyuhiko Shimomura, an English professor at Kyoto Women’s University. He was seeking a guest lecturer for his course, “US History and Race”, in which a person of color would share their race-related experience with his Japanese students.
I was very excited to participate in this opportunity, but of course, it presented a few challenges. The presentation had to be at a level of English that the students could follow, but also accurately and earnestly depict my experience with race in America. I had to come up with a learning experience that would strike the perfect balance between simple and complex.
The Situation: How can I build a 60-minute, one-time lecture for Japanese students that paints an accurate picture of race and racism in the United States?
Duration of project: 2 months
Audience: Undergraduate Japanese students of English
Format: In-person workshop/Adobe Captivate module
My Role: I developed the learning experience, script, and materials independently, and coordinated with Professor Shimomura frequently to determine the needs of his students.
Skills Demonstrated: Instructional Design (Higher Ed), eLearning Development
I took a waterfall approach to this project, since there was two months to complete the project and it had a simple set of objectives.
Needs Analysis
Understanding that Shimomura’s students were Japanese students of English, I knew that I had to keep simplicity of language in mind while developing this project. Shimomura was also kind enough to provide me with the topics they had already discussed, which included (but were not limited to:
The “post-racial” ideology
“Civilization” of Native Americans
Thanksgiving vs. Thanks-taking
History of immigration from Europe
Plantations and racial inequality
Civil War and the termination of slavery
One drop rule & White privilege
I determined that, in the short amount of time that I would have to discuss such a complex topic, a simulation would be effective for illustrating, rather than explaining, the experience of racial inequality in the US.
Structure
I wrote a set of learning objectives and structure for the original lecture and Google Slides presentation. I incorporated a choose-your-own-adventure style for the simulation, harnessing the interactions and curiosity from the students to illustrate my points.
I used inspiration from the video game “Depression Quest” to represent how privileges grant, or take away, certain options. It was up to the students to decide if they would focus on using their motivation to reach their goals, or depleting their levels of happiness.
Facilitation
I facilitated this learning experience for Shimomura’s class at Kyoto Women’s University on November 25, 2019. It incorporated the interactive portion, as well as a personal narrative. I answered questions and related their questions back to their in-class learnings. Take a look at this excerpt below!
eLearning Module
Later, I adapted this learning experience into an Adobe Captivate module as an exercise in eLearning development. I made sure to incorporate the functionality of the simulation.
