ICMEE is proud to have a genuinely wonderful team of researchers, teacher educators, and teachers working together every day to help teachers and students in numerous ways. Each month, we will highlight an amazing team member going above and beyond to further the work of ICMEE. This month, the spotlight is on Xiaoyan Gu.
Xiaoyan Gu is a Graduate Teaching and Research Assistant in the Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education department, and a third-year doctoral student. Xiaoyan is originally from Yantai, China, one of Omaha’s 5 sister cities. Xiaoyan’s name in Chinese is written with 3 characters as "顾晓岩.”“顾” is her family name, "晓" means sun rising and signals hope, and “岩” means rocks. Xiaoyan’s family gave her that name in hopes that she would grow to be tough, strong, and always full of hope.
Xiaoyan has a passion for working with numbers and loves statistics, so her focus with ICMEE is largely on analyzing the team’s quantitative research data. If you ask Xiaoyan what her role is within ICMEE, she will playfully say that her job is to joke and make the team laugh. Her light-heartedness, bright spirit, and expertise are invaluable to ICMEE. Outside of work, Xiaoyan is a huge fan of sleep, and she enjoys late starts to her days whenever possible, as well as cooking and baking when time allows.
Xiaoyan’s research focuses on teachers’ assessment literacy and practices with multilingual students. “As a multilingual learner myself,” Xiaoyan says, “I feel I should speak up for myself and multilingual learners and work on ways to bring equality in the assessment of multilingual learners in schools.” Xiaoyan’s parents and family are a constant inspiration and motivation to her in all that she does. Her parents live in China and miss her dearly, especially since Xiaoyan is the only child in her family, but everyone back home is extremely supportive as she continues to pursue her dreams halfway around the world.
More details at: https://cehs.unl.edu/icmee/about-us/