Zhenjie Weng

2021

Weng intends to use grant funds to create a Pressbook which covers a range of free resources as well as linguistic, cultural and social context needed for Advanced English as a Second Language. This course, for international graduate students, is intended to teach the basics of plagiarism in the U.S. context as well as academic culture and norms of social communication. The Racial Justice Grant portion of this award will include updating online reading resources on racial justice issues about African Americans and other marginalized groups in the U.S. context. These assignments will be due weekly to increase student awareness around how to be allies and how to support marginalized populations.

2022

Weng will utilize grant funds to provide a list of pedagogical texts for graduate teaching assistants in the GTA Group Studies course. As graduate students, mostly from Asian countries, these topics are often not overtly discussed. Most of these students are not professionally trained to talk about racial and sexual identities of people of color in the United States. Additional readings implemented into the course will cover these areas and give students more direction on how to discuss race and sexual issues in ESL classes.