Staff profile

Yuqian (Linda) is Assistant Professor in the School of Education specialising in mathematics education, for which she has particular responsibility. She gained professional experience of teaching mathematics at various levels of education, firstly in Shanghai and subsequently in the UK, leading to her long-standing research interest in curriculum design for both secondary and upper primary level mathematics, and the integration of East-West pedagogies rooted in variation theory/mathematics mastery. Her three-year Fusion Maths project, completed in 2021, successfully pioneered the latter approach at St Bees, an international school in Cumbria, leading to an advanced understanding of how the integration of approaches impacts on the development of thinking skills, such as deductive reasoning. She has conducted several projects to explore ways of sequencing teaching content through cumulative knowledge and understanding, with a particular focus on reasoning by way of a Causal Connectivity Framework (CCF) that integrates reasoning with maths teaching and learning. With a growing concern for future-orientated mathematics education, Linda became interested in the topic of mathematical creativity following various challenges to her own notions of the nature of mathematics, which she is now actively developing and expanding on.

Linda fulfils various roles in the School of Education, including as PGCE Secondary Maths Lead, ITE Numeracy Reporting Lead, and convenor of two Master’s level modules – Self-Directed Study (SDS) and Teaching and Learning in the Curriculum (T&L) for all PGCE programmes. She supervises a number of PGR students working in various mathematics education areas, leads the Laidlaw Scholarship project impacting on Multi-Academy Trusts, and supports the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Research programme as Faculty Advisor.

Linda graduated with BSc and MSc degrees in Maths Education and qualified as a teacher (and regional maths hub coordinator) in Shanghai, where she taught secondary maths for over ten years, following which she obtained her QTS/NQT in England. Her research began with a comparative study of students’ understanding (the focus of her PhD research) which led onto developing mathematics mastery pedagogy (her first post-doctoral research project), and educational evaluation (her second post-doctoral research project). She would be very pleased to hear from current or prospective students who are interested in studying mathematics teaching and learning at the School of Education.