On Sabbatical (Spring 2025 & Spring 2026)
Dr. Ting Yuan is an associate professor teaching in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at CUNY College of Staten Island. She has taught teacher education courses in the following areas: 1) early childhood and elementary literacy methods, 2) computational thinking in the classroom, and 3) creative computing in education. Dr. Yuan’s research critically and passionately explores the intersections of literacy, race, culture, and technology. Her work focuses on creative (digital) literacies, embodied multimodality in children's language and literacy practices, and the ways in which children and pre-/in-service teachers from diverse backgrounds engage in creative literacies within multilingual, multicultural, and technologically rich contexts.
Her scholarly work has appeared in journals, including Young Exceptional Children, Childhood Education, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, English Journal, English Leadership Quarterly, and others. Yuan was the recipient of NCTE Geneva Smitherman Cultural Diversity Grant Award (2014) and NCTE Research Foundation Grant Award (2023). She served as a campus lead on CUNY's Computing Integrated Teacher Education Initiative (2021-2025) and was a 2024-2025 CUNY Building Bridges of Knowledge Faculty Fellow in AI Education. Most recently, representing the College of Staten Island, Yuan joined the 2024-2025 Cohort of Scratch Education Collaborative by the Scratch Foundation to elevate the college's teacher education programs toward equitable creative computing across disciplines.
Yuan received her B.A. from East China University of Political Science & Law; an M.A. in Curriculum and Teaching (Elementary Education) from Teachers College, Columbia University; and an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Degrees
Ed.D. in Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University
M.A. in Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University
Selected Publications
Yuan. T. (2024). Poem: Confession of a Motherscholar of a “Satellite Baby.” English Journal, 113(4), 20.
Yuan, T. (2023). Poem: Motherscholar Work on #StopAsianHate during COVID-19. English Journal, 112(4), 106.
Yuan, T., & Grant, R. (2023). Digital storytelling of two “underperforming” and “misbehaving” boys of color in a second grade classroom. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 37(3), 366–386. Link
Yuan, T., Waite, S., Bristol. T., & Mentor, M. (2023). NYC Men Teach: Listening to and supporting early-career Asian American male teachers in English teaching. English Leadership Quarterly, 45(3), 5-12. Link
Yuan, T. (2022). A critical pedagogy for love and healing toward anti-Asian racism and Xenophobia. Journal of Language and Literacy Education, 18(2), 1-5. Link
Yuan, T., Grant, R., & Jiang, H. (2022). Translanguaging as an enactment of “Changjinglu” with a Chinese Satellite Baby in a Head Start classroom. In S. DeCapua & E. Hancı-Azizoglu (Eds.), Global and transformative approaches toward linguistic diversity (pp. 49-65). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Link
Yuan, T. (2022). Enacting culturally sustaining teaching: Book co-authoring and co-making by preservice teachers and their child partners. In C. Lin, N. Bell, & J. Cowin (Eds.), Supporting student success through community assets mapping: A NYS TESOL E-Book (pp. 72-79). New York, NY: NYS TESOL. Link
Yuan, T. & Patel, A. (2022). “If young children can code, why can’t we try?”: Computational storytelling in early childhood teacher education. Childhood Education: Innovations, 98(6), 56-61. Link
Yuan, T., & Jiang, H. (2019). Culturally responsive teaching for children from low-income, immigrant families. Young Exceptional Children, 22(3), 150-161. Link
Yuan, T. (2017). The teaching of “dangerous” school bodies: Toward critical embodied pedagogies in English education. English Journal, 106(4), 67-72. Link
Yuan, T., & Bakian-Aaker, L. (2015). Classroom digital storytelling in grades K-2: Writers make a movie for the reader. Childhood Education, 91(5), 402–404.
Yuan, T. (2012). From Ponyo to “my Garfield story”: Using digital comics as an alternative pathway to literary compositions. Childhood Education, 87(4), 297–301.
Yuan, T., Crowley, J., Asunka, S., Chae, H. S., Natriello, G. (2010). “Build it and they will come?” A case study of the use of wikis in a higher education research unit. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 3(3), 39–44.
Conference Presentations (2024-2025)
Garcia, M., & Yuan, T. (2025). Multilingual Digital Storytelling with Scratch. NCTE Assembly on Computers in English. To be presented at 2025 NCTE Annual Convention. Denver, CO.
Sanchez, J., Yuan, T., *Gunn, O., *Mchugh, N., *Kent, K., *Vega, N., & *Camacho, J. (2025). Scratch as a Creative Playground in Early Childhood Teacher Education. Expo Booth presented at the 2025 MIT Scratch Conference, July 24, 2025.
(*Undergraduate Student)
Yuan, T., & Sanchez, J. (2024). From unplugged to plugged in: Computational storytelling in a 3rd grade classroom. Roundtable presented at the 2024 NCTE Annual Convention on November 16-19, 2024. Boston, MA.
Yuan, T., *Khalil, B., &*Khass, R. (2024). Creative literacies via Scratch: Computational storytelling by pre-service teachers. Spotlight session presented at the 2024 MIT Scratch Conference, July 24-25, 2024.
(*Undergraduate Student)
Yuan, T. (2024). “Train an AI to pronounce your name.” Presented as part of a panel entitled Mobilizing AI to Support Teacher Candidates’ Reflective P-12 Teaching. City University of New York Education Conference on April 19, 2024. New York, NY.
Yuan, T., Cabral, M., Kerekes, J., *Khalil, B., &*Khass, R. (2024). Unplugged to plugged in: Cultivating computational thinking in early childhood teacher education. Panel presentation at the 2024 City University of New York Education Conference on April 19, 2024. New York, NY.
(*Undergraduate Student)
Yuan, T. (2024). New affordances and possibilities: Creative literacies via computational storytelling in early childhood teacher education. Paper presented as part of a roundtable session entitled “Researching Play, Language, and Literacy Practices to Interrupt Injustice and Unburden Early Education” at the 2024 Annual Conference of American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Philadelphia, PA.
Yuan, T. (2024). Building capacity together: Faculty co-learning computational storytelling with early childhood preservice teachers. Poster presented as part of a poster session entitled “Expansive framings of “capacity building” in Computing Education: Agency, infrastructure, and advocacy” at the 2024 Annual Conference of American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Philadelphia, PA.
Course Teaching
EDC 218 Language and Literacy in the Early Childhood Curriculum
EDE 615 Special Topics in Computational Literacy
EDE 305 Social Studies, Art, and Reading and Language Arts in Elementary Education
EDC 310 The Teaching of Reading and Writing in the Primary Grades
EDC 440/441 Student Teaching and Seminar in Early Childhood Education
EDC 600 Contemporary Curriculum in Early Childhood Education
EDD 691 Perspectives on Managing Diverse Learning Settings
EDD 711 Introduction to Computational Thinking for Teachers
