It’s not every day that a new face joins the heart of our teaching community. This term, a new faculty member has joined Carleton’s Department of Education Studies.
Dr. Ziye Wen completed her undergraduate degree in early childhood education in China. She later received her Ph.D in educational psychology at The Ohio State University, and ultimately decided to come to Carleton for the next step in her career. She joins the department as a junior postdoctoral fellow and teaching faculty member.
In graduate school, Wen studied the application of learning technologies in K-12 settings. She worked with elementary classrooms to co-develop an innovative civic learning curriculum for public schools.
“We work with early lessons in upper elementary school. We incorporate different components, like a community engaged approach, where we want students and children to think about the problems they’re going to solve [together],” Wen said.
Although the cultural shift has been significant, Wen said her years at Ohio State pushed her forward in the field of education. “I’m very grateful that I was treated very well by my advisors in my doctoral program,” Wen said.
Wen noted that traditional education in many parts of China is highly teacher-centered, though the system has started to experiment with more interactive methods that provide children with greater agency in their learning. While at Ohio State, Wen and her colleagues developed and expanded upon these ideas to include older students.
Beyond academics, Wen is a versatile person with a wide range of interests in. She enjoys visiting national parks, baking, hiking, cycling and dancing.
Wen chose Carleton for the opportunity to join an active and engaged learning community. “I think Carleton is an environment where I have this experience of being a teacher with different age groups, Wen said. “I really enjoy this process of interacting with the students and to figure out what they are trying to pursue, what they would need… and I really enjoy this reciprocal process,”
Wen believes that classroom settings are important for students to thrive. “I want to make sure that the students are getting supported,” she said. “I want to follow the golden rule — you want to treat someone as you want to be treated.”
Her arrival marks a period of transition for the department.. “I think this is a moment [where] we’re in a very big transition, and so we wanted to have a post-doc position for us to get a sense of where the field of educational psychology is right now to see what recent graduate students are doing,” said Professor Anita Chikkatur, chair of the Department of Education Studies.
In the upcoming winter term, Wen will teach two courses: “Introduction to Education Studies” and “Educational Psychology.”
“I think it’s really exciting [to have a new faculty],” said Anne Grace Hooper ’26,an Education Studies Minor and department SDA. “Something that I love about the Ed Studies Department is that all the professors have different interests, so you can always find something that you’re interested in.”
Currently, Wen and her colleagues are working on a project exploring college students’ perceptions of good citizenship, drawing on responses from students across multiple countries. A f survey was recently sent out to the Carleton community to support the research.
Wen hopes the responses will deepen her understanding of how people perceive democracy and understand education as a tool to construct the characteristics of people. “I believe doing research with cautious students and knowing what they think about this is going to be very helpful for my course design as well,” she said.
“I really want to see how people are viewing this [survey], and that kind of informs a course that I’m designing and I’m about to teach next year, which is about citizens, citizenship, [and] education.”
Wen’s long-term goal is to advance interest in “civil education,” an approach she sees as a foundation for all learning. She believes that this idea should extend beyond social studies and into subjects like science and art, because all disciplines contribute to “cultivating citizens.”
“Next year, she’ll be designing and teaching a course of her own that comes out of her expertise and specialties,” Chikkatur said. “I think she’ll be adding quite a bit to what we already offer, but also adding to the curriculum.”
“You can take educational psychology with Ziye in the spring,” Chikkatur added. “And that could be your first class [in Educational Studies] — andI really do think that it works well.”