The charter school where Qiwen Zheng ’22 teaches ninth grade biology is tucked in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles’ Koreatown – an unwelcoming habitat for most plants and animals. So Zheng breathes life into her biology lessons by organizing nature walks, bringing roly-polies to class, and forging connections with students whose experiences reflect her own.

Zheng is among “a group of exceptional educators committed to advancing math and science education across the nation” selected as a prestigious Knowles Teaching Fellow. As a teacher and fellow, Zheng combines her dual degrees in international studies and ecology and evolutionary biology from UC Irvine with her master’s in education from Stanford University.

“I really want to provide resources for low-income students, and to act as a guide for them, like my mentor, Professor Long Bui, was to me,” Zheng says.

Bui, who is a UC Irvine professor of global and international studies, helped Zheng identify a unique career path that combines her love of science with her desire to find new and better ways to teach life science from a global and historical perspective.

Planting the seeds

Nature drew Zheng to UC Irvine. The lush, tree-lined campus surrounding Aldrich Park reminded her of the greenery of her birthplace near the mouth of the Min River in Fuzhou, China. It was an environment she missed when her family moved to the arid Rancho Cucamonga, California, when she was nine.

Zheng enrolled at UCI as an ecology and evolutionary biology major, but found herself yearning to connect her culture to her academic work. The course catalog listing for an Orientalism class piqued her interest. Little did Zheng know, the course, taught by Bui, would alter the direction of her academic career – and her life.

“Orientalism really connected things that I had experienced in real life,” Zheng says, recalling racist and xenophobic slurs thrown at her over the years. “It was really enlightening for me to understand that my personal experience was connected to global phenomena like migration and wars.”

Hoping to complement her biology coursework with something that linked her identity, Zheng visited Bui’s office hours to discuss adding a second major such as East Asian studies or Asian American studies. Ultimately, she chose international studies, an interdisciplinary degree in the School of Social Sciences that combines global politics, economics, cultures and history.

“Qiwen, as a student, was always naturally curious in a deep and profoundly interdisciplinary way,” Bui says. “She took the liberal arts general education opportunities of UCI to their maximum potential, drawing on STEM, the social sciences, humanities and arts to do research and service.”

Pedagogical perspective

Doubling down on international studies as a junior, Zheng completed the year-long honors program. Developing her honors thesis was a “life-changing experience” that gave her the opportunity to blend her interests in ecology, international studies and education – building on her experiences as a biology tutor and working in a Montessori preschool. Drawing on examples from Latin America and Africa, she developed the idea of “permapedagogy,” which uses environmental education and sustainable agriculture practices to teach K-12 science in a local context. Not only does it educate students about their immediate environment, it can also help provide food and preserve natural ecosystems.

“Permapedagogy is where we take learning to outdoor spaces, and connect our learning to our roots by understanding indigenous people’s relationship with the land,” explains Zheng.

“I felt ungrounded in high school because I did not get in touch with my culture,” she says. “So what would it look like to tap into understanding of native communities in your own high school experiences, localizing the plants, species and cultures to center indigenous learning to build a more comprehensive educational experience?”

Those questions led her to pursue teaching. After graduating from UC Irvine in 2022, Zheng earned her master’s in education at Stanford and completed her teacher training working in the San Mateo Union High School District in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2024, Zheng was among 31 educators nationwide selected for the Knowles Teacher Initiative. The five-year program offers early-career high school science and math teachers resources including mentorship, financial support for classroom resources and professional development, and access to a supportive network of educators.

“We look at our student data to find insights, and we look at student work to further understand what ‘doing’ science looks like in the classroom, and how we can better provide students the experience of leading their own learning in the classroom,” Zheng says.

“But the most important part for me is to have resources from different teachers across the country,” she adds. “Everything that’s local is also global, so one of the interesting parts is looking at the different contexts in which teachers are teaching in other parts of the country, and getting to know the different tools, resources and ways they teach.”

Connecting with students

At Rise Kohyang High School in Los Angeles, the students call her Miss Wen, short for Qiwen. The charter school pupils represent a variety of ethnicities, and most are low-income – something she can relate to.

“I really want to holistically serve students of color, and provide resources for them,” she says. “My students are very intelligent, but they might bring more traumas to school that they need to process. I do not hold them to a different standard than my higher income students in San Mateo – I’m using the same, if not more rigorous, curriculum.”

Some students were slow to warm to Zheng’s high standards. “Now they ask questions if they need help. It’s not like, ‘Oh I can't do this, I'm going to give up.’ Instead it’s, ‘I can’t do this. Can you help me?’” she says. “It’s been very good to see them grow and take more initiative in their learning.”

Zheng strives to pass on the joy she finds in biology to her students – although there are some challenges in a big city where even the school’s outdoor courtyard is covered in artificial grass. Zheng has taken her classes on a local nature walk, a trip to the Natural History Museum, California Science Center, and the Exposition Park rose garden. Thanks to the Knowles program’s funding, Zheng is ordering DNA models that will give her students hands-on understanding of the iconic double helix that contains the genetic code for all living things.

While this is just the beginning of Zheng’s five-year commitment to teaching science in a high-needs high school through the Knowles program, she is already thinking about her own growth. She aims to eventually earn a Ph.D. in education, leveraging her experiences as a classroom teacher to further build on ideas from her undergraduate thesis.

Bui sees this as a promising path. “As a future Ph.D. and researcher, Qiwen will offer more than just academic prowess but also great heart and emotional intelligence,” he says. “She understands how people work across different planes of thinking and being, which is why she is a great teacher and natural scholar.”

While Zheng helps her students thrive now, she hopes that by nurturing permapedagogy through research and scholarship in the future, she can help even more students and their local ecosystems flourish together.

-Christine Byrd for UCI Social Sciences