For Jie Li, professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Shaowen Zhang exemplifies the best a teaching fellow can be. “Having worked with some two-dozen teaching fellows (TFs) at Harvard for the last decade,” she wrote in her nomination letter, “I can say with confidence that Shaowen is one of the most gifted, inspiring, and dedicated graduate student teachers I have ever encountered.” As head teaching fellow for Li’s General Education course “East Asian Cinema,” Zhang was an invaluable interlocutor during the annual process of revising and updating the syllabus to keep up with student interests and concerns—which included demands for more female filmmakers, Asian-American representation in recent Hollywood cinema, the incorporation of television and animation, and the inclusion of content advisories for films that might trigger traumatic experiences.
To create a diverse and inclusive learning environment, Zhang spent many hours manually sectioning 130 to 170 students every term to accommodate their preferred time slots while balancing gender, ethnicity, year in the College, and fields of study. In regular staff meetings, she came up with questions and activities that elicited input from students and inspired them to invest in each other’s ideas. She also generously shared her lesson plans and slides with the other TFs.
When students walked into one of Zhang’s sections, they would often find a clip playing from a film related to the course topic. The TF would then solicit open statements about what resonated from the screened materials and delve into the central analytical questions of the week—such as the differences between sound and silent cinema, the pros and cons of auteur theory, etc.—before moving into historical contextualization, clip analyses, and creative posting workshops. Students appreciated how Zhang adapted to their learning needs. One wrote, “Shaowen is great at putting other perspectives and points into our minds.” Another said “Shaowen helped facilitate one of my favorite sections at Harvard! Once, she found out that we severely lacked film theory ability, she specifically made a crash course for us on how to describe film, then took out actual examples from our posts as correction practices.”
Zhang also served as head TF for “Anime as Global Popular Culture,” taught by Tomiko Yoda, Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities. “Although Japanese anime is not her field of specialization, Shaowen was able to apply her broad knowledge of Asian film and media to lead terrific section meetings,” said Yoda. “She received highly positive responses from her students for one-on-one meetings she had with them outside of classrooms, offering effective advice on how to improve their graded assignments.”
Shaowen Zhang, the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is pleased to present you with the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates. Congratulations!
More on the 2023 Derek C. Bok Awards
