Teaching
# R Intro; # News Database Scraping; # Text Mining & Visualization; # Structural Topic Modeling
Communication Theory
I taught tutorial sessions for Journalism 201 Introduction to Mass Communication in Fall 2023. In my sessions, I experimented with various activities to cultivate a safe, open, and creative classroom vibe while encouraging students to critically engage with communication theories and American politics. Some activities include:
Self-Portrait Ice-Breaker
Students and I drew our 'self-portraits' on the blackboard to illustrate our self-images and introduced ourselves based on those portraits.
Imagining Alternative Dimensions
Besides political stalemate in institutional politics, I believe a more detrimental effect of political polarization is its monopoly of imagination. If, when confronted with any collective problem, the first thing we think about is whether a potential solution is "left-leaning" or "right-leaning", we can never achieve any meaningful change. Centrism is not the way, as it is itself parasitic to the left-right system. This activity encouraged students to think beyond the "horizontal" dimension of left-right and imagine other value axes with current political affairs in mind.
Meme Competition
Students made memes to illustrate communication theories we learned throughout the semester. In the last tutorial session, we held a meme competition where students voted for their favorite meme with chocolates I prepared (one person one vote). Every student won the chocolates cast for their meme, while the creator of the most popular meme won a copy of my beloved book Bullshiit Jobs by David Graeber.
Research methods
I taught tutorial sessions for Psychology 225 Research Methods in Fall 2021 and Spring 2022. I coached around 70 sophomore and junior students majoring in psychology to complete their research proposals on topics ranging from criminal- to neuropsychology. I am happy to provide course materials upon request.
I have been co-hosting a computational methods workshop with Wil Dubree since Spring 2023. We have developed a set of teaching materials for Python and R coding, some of which are available on our website.
Strategic Communication
One of my favorite courses to teach is Journalism 345 Strategic Communication Principles & Practices. I taught this course in Fall 2022, Spring and Summer 2023, and I am teaching it again in Spring 2024. I have developed various materials and activities that guide groups of students to complete strategic communication campaign proposals.
Simmons MRI tutorial for market research
Creative storyboard sctivities that help students formulate high-level campaign strategies
Media buying workshop activities
Creative mockup competition where students materialize their ideas through multimedia formats
Students' work (all done by individual students in 1 hour)
Students Say...
"I really appreciated the welcoming environment she created and the openness she inspired from everyone in the section. I'm pretty sure most people attended every time because we genuinely enjoyed hearing and participating in the conversations and discussion topics. I feel like I grew immensely as a writer and consumer of media from this section and the feedback and teachings from Abby. She managed to keep all of the topics engaging and tied them to familiar knowledge I already had. I thought all feedback was incredibly helpful and respectful, and I could tell she took a great deal of time and effort to give those responses. Further, Abby's email communications were extremely useful in my case and contributed to the well-organized structure of the class and discussion section."
"You could tell that Abby truly wants all of us to succeed and she always made sure we fully understood all aspects of assignments and provided feedback to all of us."
"She is very sweet and provides helpful feedback on writing assignments. She was also very well informed and reliable. The way she led our section was also very enjoyable and engaging."
"Friendly, relatable, able to make sure nobody is confused and understands the concept we are discussing."
"Abby was the best TA I've ever had! She was very responsive and always helped me during office hours when I needed it."
"I loved the feedback we get. It's clear and concise but still more about the things we write about rather than how we write it. She helped me improve my writing a lot."
"She was very empathetic and understood us as students"