My name is Xia “Emily” Yang. I started my career in mathematics education at Shanghai High School International Division in 2012, immediately after achieving a Master of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Growing up in Shanghai’s competitive educational system, yet instructing international students from varied cultural backgrounds in a US-based curriculum, I realized significant disparities in school mathematics education between Eastern and Western approaches. This experience served as a catalyst for me to initiate a journey of comparative exploration into mathematics education. Shanghai Institute for International Curriculum Research, located at Shanghai High School, has amassed extensive expertise in the comparison of high school mathematics. However, research in the context of middle school mathematics remains relatively limited.
With the sprawling of bilingual schools in Shanghai, I became a pivotal member of the founding team at Shanghai Hangzhou-Bay Bilingual School. I started the work of designing a new curriculum based on the Shanghai mathematics curriculum while incorporating the strengths of the US Common Core Standards. With four years’ implementation, the teaching attempt has been proved effective and successful. As I delve deeper into mathematics education, I recognized the the importance of advanced mathematics in the professional development of teachers, which prompted me to further my academic pursuit with a Master of Mathematics program at the University of Waterloo.
I aspire not only to cultivate students’ mathematical abilities but also to expand their intellectual horizons. In terms of pure mathematics, my particular interest lies in the realm of deductive reasoning. What teaching strategies can improve students’ deductive reasoning in solving high-cognitive geometric problems? Can this reasoning ability be transferred to the university-level studies and future work? In addition to cultivating students’ mathematical abilities, I also try to incorporate interdisciplinary application of mathematics into education, including integrating math lessons with real-world problems, projects, and case studies from different fields. Through the interdisciplinary practices, I experienced the challenges in designing and implementing due to lack of resources (i.e., technology support). Moreover, balancing individualized learning with collaborative interdisciplinary work can be complex. All the challenges I have encountered in my teaching practices inspire me to pursue further research.