The Office of Global Affairs is excited to celebrate Yen-Chu Weng for our November 2024 edition of the Global Visionaries series. The Global Visionaries series highlights the UW’s global impact by featuring innovative, globally-engaged faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Dr. Yen-Chu Weng, Lecturer, Program on the Environment, describes her experience advancing global learning opportunities between the United States and East Asia – and reducing barriers to participation – for students at the University of Washington.
Dr. Yen-Chu Weng obtained a PhD in Geography & Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, she earned a MS in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Geography & Botany from National Taiwan University. Her knowledge and expertise includes environmental studies, sustainability, geography, data analysis, research methods, and international and regional studies.
I was born and raised in Taiwan. From an early age, I knew I wanted to explore more of the world. I chose geography as my field of study when I went to National Taiwan University. I really enjoyed all of the field components of the curriculum, especially going out to explore different topics across various regions in Taiwan. While I was in university, I took advantage of an opportunity to go on a new global exchange program to Germany. The language program allowed me to study German intensively for three months in Munich. In my senior year, I decided to study abroad again but this time in Australia on an exchange program to the University of Melbourne. My first few weeks in Australia were very difficult as I figured out how to navigate a different system of higher education and I gained more confidence to speak out during class discussions.
After I graduated from university, I spent one month in Taiwan after returning from Australia before I packed up all of my things and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. I came to the United States in 2003 to continue studying geography in graduate school. While I was in graduate school, I served as a teaching assistant for multiple courses in my department. It was a very formative experience for me. I learned more about what higher education looks like in the United States. I found a way to deliver instructions to students in my class while sharing my own perspectives. It involved a lot of self preparation and learning from my peers and mentors to learn how to adopt a more interactive teaching style.
My first job after graduate school was in the Program on the Environment in the College of the Environment at the University of Washington back in 2013. For the first couple of years, I mainly focused on developing curriculum and learning the curriculum in my program. In 2017 or 2018, after establishing some of my teaching credentials in my program, I decided to incorporate more of an global learning component into our curriculum. I saw there was a demand from students in the Program on the Environment to learn more about environmental issues in countries outside of the Western context. I decided to challenge myself and started seeking opportunities to bring in an international perspective to our curriculum. I got started by making connections with colleagues in Taiwan to lay the groundwork for a new study abroad program.
After launching my study abroad program to Taiwan, I began to explore other ways I could incorporate global learning into my day-to-day instruction in Seattle. I had a vision to create more inclusive global learning opportunities for students. I noticed there wasn’t a course at the UW that focused on environmental issues in East Asia, so I decided to create one to fill this gap – “ENVIR 430/JSIS 484: Environmental Issues of East Asia”. I am very thankful for my program director and for the Taiwan Studies Program at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies for their support in launching and promoting the course. I was eager to offer UW students a different perspective. The course focuses on Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. Every time I offer the course, it draws undergraduate students from both international studies and environmental studies, as well as a few graduate students looking to advance their degree in environmental policy in East Asia.
In 2021, I decided to apply for a Teaching & Curriculum Award through the Office of Global Affairs’ Global Innovation Fund to bring even more of a global dimension to the course. I used the award funds to invite speakers from Taiwan and other scholars from East Asia to give virtual guest lectures. The lectures coincidentally mostly focused on climate change issues – from climate actions to public opinion about climate change to what data tells us about changes in climate patterns.
In 2022, I applied for another Teaching & Curriculum Award to deepen and broaden the content of the course. I used the award funds to invite several speakers across East Asia to focus on different perspectives when it comes to renewable energy issues. All of the lectures were hosted as an online YouTube webinar so students, not just in my classes, but other students, can sign up to watch the virtual lectures. Thanks to the great support of the Taiwan Studies Program, all of those videos have been archived and are available to anyone who wants to watch them.
In 2022, I realized I wanted to learn more about how to reduce barriers to global learning for students. With that in mind, I applied to be a part of the first cohort of UW Collaborative Online International Learning Fellows (COIL) to include faculty from the Seattle campus. COIL, a virtual exchange pedagogy that creates multicultural learning environments by linking university classes in different countries, expanded to the Seattle campus in 2022 after several years of collaboration and success at the Bothell and Tacoma campuses.
The 2023-2024 COIL Fellows cohort, with the support of the Office of Global Affairs at the Seattle campus, the Office of Global Affairs at the Tacoma campus, and Global Initiatives at the Bothell campus, was an amazing community of UW faculty interested in COIL pedagogy. We participated in workshops and trainings together during the Winter 2023 and Spring 2023 quarters and learned directly from previous COIL Fellows at the UW. Those two quarters that were focused on course development really helped me design my own COIL project.
I decided to branch out of my comfort zone and take an interdisciplinary approach by connecting with someone who is in the field of special education. I reached out to a professor at National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan, Professor Chen-Chen Cheng, who was actually a colleague of mine from when I was a graduate student in Wisconsin. Our first challenge was to figure out how to develop and design a topic that would resonate with students from both of our courses and both of our universities. After a lot of brainstorming, we decided to focus our COIL project on evaluating the accessibility of interpretive signs in nature parks. The project included an environmental education piece, which my students could relate to, and an accessibility piece, which her student could relate to. We developed a protocol to analyze signs for their physical accessibility, communication accessibility, and multi-modality experience.
It took us about six months to plan the project, especially given the 15 hour time difference (my class met in the late afternoon and Professor Chen-Chen Cheng’s class met in the early morning) and because of scheduling, given the UW is on a quarter system and National Kaohsiung Normal University is on a semester system. We also created a Google Site so all of the students could have access to the same information.
What resulted was a five-week collaboration between my Environmental Issues of East Asia course and Professor Chen-Chen Cheng’s course in Special Education. Students attended joint lectures for two hours each week – and collaborated offline outside of lectures – on the basic design principles for accessible interpretive signs and inclusive communication for people with disabilities. They also conducted field work to observe and analyze interpretive signs in their respective cities – The UW Arboretum and the UW Farm in Seattle and several parks in Kaohsiung and Tainan, two major cities in Southern Taiwan. The students were intentionally split into seven groups, with a mix of American and Taiwanese students in each group. On the last day of the COIL project, the groups co-facilitated short presentations on Zoom.
Throughout the COIL project, my students and I were really grateful for the Taiwanese students for navigating the project entirely in English. My students at the UW were aware of this privilege and tried to use Google Translate and to communicate using gestures and body language to navigate the language barriers. Overall, the students really enjoyed taking their learning outside the classroom and expanding their perspectives by learning about another culture and discovering new ways to look at issues around the world.
The COIL project allowed me to further understand how many similarities there are between the daily lives of people throughout the world, although of course differences still exist. When discussing accessibility, many of the same issues arose in both the United States and Taiwan.”
I was inspired to propose the idea for this course after noticing an increase in awareness about teaching about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) in social studies across the K to 12 curriculum. I wasn’t aware of much curriculum being developed around these goals at the higher education level and I was curious to see if there were other faculty members or researchers or staff at the UW who saw their work aligned with the goals. So in 2022, I applied to be a Global Engagement Fellow through the Global Innovation Fund to create a community for faculty and staff at the UW to explore pedagogical tools to engage with the UN SDGs through their courses to promote global literacy and cross-cultural competence.
What I like about the UN SDGs is that there are 17 goals that foster peace and prosperity for people and the planet. While my own field relates more to the environmental elements of those goals, the goals encompass a wide range of critical issues, including poverty, social issues, gender equality, population health, education, infrastructure, global partnerships and policies and more. It’s a unique framework to think about how to address issues that every country in the world is facing and to discover solutions for how to improve the world.
During the Spring 2023 and Spring 2024 quarters, I was fortunate enough through a partnership with the Office of Global Affairs and the Population Health Initiative to offer a one credit General Studies course to introduce students to the UN SDGs called “United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Global Goals, Local Actions“. The seminar invited experts and scholars from across the UW and the Seattle region to address each of the 17 goals. I reached out to UW faculty across campus to focus on different aspects of the UN SDGs to provide students with an interdisciplinary perspective.
My goal was to cultivate a strong commitment to global citizenship among UW students.
After offering the course twice so far, I have been contacted by several faculty members at the UW who are also thinking about using the UN SDGs framework to develop a course in their own majors – such as in Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health and in Landscape Architecture. For future iterations, I plan to create more opportunities for the students in the course to build community and connect with the guest speakers.