Helena Löthman

Teaching

I have been teaching Chinese since 1992, first at Stockholm University, since 2010 here at Uppsala University. I teach a wide range of courses at undergraduate and graduate level, mostly language courses involving text reading and grammar, but also pronunciation exercises for beginners in the language and supervision of bachelor theses..

Pedagogical view

To learn something really well you need joy, practise, enthusiasm, practise, even more joy and then a bit more practice. After thousands of hours practice you master it!

I see my role as a teacher to guide my students to knowledge. The individual student does the work of learning by spending time and effort on the subject, while I introduce concepts and grammar, explain structures and help out when difficulties arise. I offer my students a "smorgasbord" of learning strategies and study techniques. I give them exercises and tasks to solve, sometimes in groups, sometimes individually. With the different versions I hope to cover all individual students' needs of ways to learn.

Mentor

I am a member of the mentor network and take mentoring assignments in Swedish and English.

I am a mentor for two reasons. One is that I want to share my experience with you and be a support, a support that wasn't available when I was a new teacher at the university. The second reason is that I'm curious about teaching methods in other disciplines and how you plan your teaching - I simply want to learn more.

I research different aspects of the socio-economic situation of Chinese women on the Chinese labor market. Other research areas of interest are the work of Chinese NGO's and the conditions of migrant workers. I am also interested in pedagogy and didactics, especially Chinese.

I am working on my doctoral thesis No Job - No Independence? Women On and Off the Labor Market in Beijing and Tianjin. It examines how Chinese women in two of China's major cities coped socio-economically with unemployment. The work is based on interviews conducted during fieldwork in Beijing and Tianjin with female workers dismissed from state-owned enterprises and with women who have found new employment after unemployment.