Storytelling as teaching

Hongye Liu is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science who is passionate about teaching Probability and Statistics for Computer Science. Her course is a foundational course for data science and machine learning in CS major. While her career began as a researcher at Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals, she discovered that teaching is her passion and has since found it to be very gratifying. Her experience in biomedical research and her encountering with students with disabilities has made her more sensitive and empathetic toward teaching and the transmission of content and ideas.

Her classes place a strong emphasis on real-world problems in homework, discussions, and project, which helps students to understand how theoretical content works in practical applications. Her learning environment is interactive and subdivided into different activities that include low-stakes assessments, Q&A sessions, and lots of positive reinforcements. One of the most powerful tools in her teaching repertoire seems to be her ability to tell stories that weave facts about relevant topics such as immunology, COVID-19, and cancer statistics into the content or lesson. This kind of storytelling as teaching creates an emotional connection to course content that moves beyond dispensing facts to a more human-centered view of the world—where expertise and data science are understood in terms of the lives they affect as much or more than as tools used to solve problems. These relatable examples help students develop and value the skill of empathizing with others, connecting to content on emotional as well as cognitive levels as they learn to use the science. Her message to fellow instructors is to find the stories in data that make science relatable and human, to treat students with kindness and compassion, and to be open-minded to all learning opportunities.