Outstanding Performance in Teaching (Individual)

With a prominent display of her acumen in comprehensively applying the learner-centred approach to teaching, Dr. Meilin Chen excels in fostering dynamic classroom interactions and inspiring frequent reflections in order to stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity. Furthermore, her significant contribution to teaching employs innovative pedagogy to encourage postgraduate students from interdisciplinary backgrounds to learn in a collaborative manner, while leveraging her research to enhance the academic writing competencies among undergraduate students.

Dr. Chen demonstrates her whole-hearted commitment to enhancing the learning experience of research postgraduate students. In the “Advanced English for Academic Purposes” course, she provides individualised support to groups of learners that are often from more than 10 different disciplines. Getting students to take on the same exercise with discipline-specific examples, she makes full use of online synchronous platforms to allow them to share observations of research writing conventions in their own disciplines. In this way, they can not only easily identify useful features for their own research writing, but also clearly see the variations of discoursal features in other disciplines. This prepares them for future collaborations in transdisciplinary projects.

In the GE Level 2 “Gender, Language, and Creativity” course, Dr. Chen incorporates varied real-life language examples and pertinent research in her teaching materials to spark students’ interest. Rather than spoon-feeding students with theories, her classes typically commence with specific language examples that can trigger interesting questions regarding the complex topic of gender. This is followed by analysis of how the researchers interpret the language phenomena. This inductive and discussion-based teaching approach is highly rated by students in their course evaluations as well as by the course external reviewer.

Dr. Chen also amplifies the teaching experience by frequently inviting in- and out-of-class reflections in varied modes and strategically fostering students’ research skills. Students can continuously reflect on gender issues in which they are interested throughout the semester. In this course, they also go through the whole process of completing a linguistics research project following the step-by-step guidance by Dr. Chen. This student-centred approach has led to her award as the recipient of the General Education (GE) Teaching Award (Individual) of Academic Year 2024/25.

Furthermore, Dr. Chen shows relentless commitment to her own continuous improvement. This involves regularly updating her disciplinary knowledge as well as teaching and information technology skills. Through her active participation in GE-related activities, she has expanded her network and gained valuable insights from her peers by engaging in class observations, sharing experiences, co-developing teaching activities and materials, and acquiring interdisciplinary perspectives through collaboration.

In recognition of her unwavering dedication and innovative pedagogies in GE teaching, as well as a dedication to constant improvement, Dr. Chen has established herself as a laudable candidate for the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Teaching (Individual).