Teaching Spotlight: Jenn Phuong (Educational Studies)

March 2025

“Professor Phuong is among the most incredible professors I've had the privilege of taking a course with and serving as an advisee…In the classroom, [Professor Phuong] incorporates different methods of engagement, incorporates mindfulness activities, and encourages a lot of creativity, making it an incredibly welcoming space. Professor Phuong's excellence and the love that students share for her are particularly apparent if you visit her office, which is adorned with mementos from previous classes and connections from previous students” (Andrés Villalba, Class of ‘25)

“Professor Phuong knows how to create an inclusive classroom space that considers the needs of all students. Her lessons are fun, engaging, and accessible, as she always provides students with multimodal resources, opportunities for collaboration, and fun final projects. She is charismatic, kind, and above all very knowledgable and passionate about her specialization, and teacher education. As a future educator, Professor Phuong has helped shape the way I think about my own teaching philosophy, especially when it comes to teaching students with disabilities and emergent bilingual students.” (Karina Flores, Class of ‘25)

Caroline sat down with Jenn in March 2025 to learn about her approach to teaching and justice work. This profile was developed from that interview. 

Teaching is more than just delivering information to students. It’s about creating a community where all learners feel seen, heard, and empowered. For a former public high school special education teacher, this philosophy is central to Jennifer Phuong’s pedagogy. With years of experience navigating the complexities of K-12 and higher education environments, Jenn brings a unique, needed and powerful perspective that combines principles of disability justice, culturally sustaining teaching, student-centered pedagogy and abolitionist teaching.

In both primary and higher education, Jenn’s pedagogy emphasizes student agency. Students are not just passive recipients of information; they are active participants in creating the classroom culture (hooks 1994 and CAST 2024). Student choice is fundamental, whether it’s deciding on the format of an assignment or selecting discussion topics. This aligns with the principle that teaching is a community—it’s not about delivering content, but about nurturing a space where students can contribute meaningfully.

Key to this approach is universal designs for learning such as modes of participation. Each class in Jenn’s curriculum includes multiple ways for students to engage with the material:

• Individual work allows for quiet reflection and deeper thought.
• Pair work facilitates collaboration and peer learning.
• Group work encourages the sharing of diverse perspectives, fostering a collective understanding.
• Reflective writing gives students an opportunity to internalize what they’ve learned and connect it to their own experiences.
• Google Docs and collaborative tools enable collective input, ensuring that every student has a voice in the learning process.

Jenn’s pedagogy has also been shaped by larger societal forces, including the pandemic. The transition to remote learning highlighted the inequalities in educational access and raised questions about the role of technology in teaching. While many educators rushed to incorporate the latest tools, Jenn was careful not to buy into the hype of “urgent” changes. Rather than focusing on quick fixes or trends, she emphasized the need for long-term relationship-building as the foundation for lasting educational change, especially during heightened moments of panic or injustice.

This shift in perspective is especially important in higher education, where policies are used as a primary measure of change or progress. Jenn resists the idea that policy changes are the only valid measure of progress. Instead, she argues that real change happens when relationships are built and when students feel they have the agency to shape their own learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom. In fact, Jenn is adamant that one cannot address injustice in the classroom without first establishing relationships: “Relationships must come first before you can address an imbalance in the classroom.” Urgency doesn’t facilitate true growth; reflection, collaboration and trusting relationships do.

This commitment to community is not just limited to the classroom. The educator draws on their experiences in activist spaces and organizing to bring real-world issues into the classroom. From student movements at Swarthmore to past struggles like anti-apartheid activism, these historical moments help students understand that change takes time, and the work they do today may not bear fruit in their time on campus or their lifetimes, but it will impact those who come after them.

Lessons in Jenn’s classes reflect this admirable philosophy. As an act of fugitive learning, Jenn cultivates classrooms as resistance spaces while noting that you can never fully or easily map revolutionary theory on classroom dynamics. Even so, Jenn incorporates histories of Swarthmore’s resistance movements into her syllabus. Last semester, collaborating with the librarians at Swarthmore, students researched movements to abolish fraternities at Swarthmore and establish the Black Cultural Center (BCC) as well as documents during protests against the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. 

Teaching such personal, political and charged topics may seem intimidating, but Jenn acknowledges how much more important it is to critically engage with these topics as a result. For Jenn, teaching is an evolving practice, and her ultimate goal is to contribute to a more just and inclusive world through education, no matter what space that education takes place in. The work is ongoing and never perfect, as Jenn says, “It’s not if you will mess up along the way, it’s when you will mess up. And when you mess up how would you want people to bring you along, into the space and into a movement? What kind of grace would you want people to give you when you mess up, because that’s what you should be offering to others when they mess up too.” It’s through these mistakes that true learning and trust happens.

In the end, teaching is not about following a set of rules or adhering to a rigid framework. It’s about continuously engaging with students as co-creators of knowledge, fostering an environment where all learners can grow, reflect, and contribute to a better world.