Yidan Zhu, Ph.D.

Program

Adult, Professional, and Community Education

Assistant Professor

Biography

Yidan Zhu (Daisy) is an Assistant Professor in Adult, Professional, and Community Education at Texas State University. She is a Chinese-Canadian scholar of adult education and community development with a focus on adult learning, immigrants’/women’s learning, aging and lifelong learning, health professions education, and professional learning in adult education. She obtained her Ph.D. in Adult Education and Community Development from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, in 2017. She received a B.A. in Theatre, Film and Literature at the Communication University of China, China and a M.Ed. in Second Language Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada. She worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of British Columbia, Canada (2018-2020) and as a Research Assistant Professor in Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, China (2020-2022).

As a scholar committed to adult learning and community development, her research focuses on how adult learning is socially organized with hierarchical and unequal social relations from local to global. Her research addresses three focal areas: 1) immigrant mothers’/women’s transnational lifelong learning; 2) professional learning; and 3) aging and adult education. Her first interest area arises from her doctoral study. Her doctoral dissertation adopted a critical ethnography in Vancouver, BC, and examined the tensions between global and neoliberal restructuring and the social organization of Chinese immigrant mothers’ knowledge and transnational learning. Her second interest area explores health professionals’ learning and professional development in medical/dental higher education and the promotion of a holistic and person-centered health professionals’ learning. She is now working on a research project examining STEM professionals’ and K-12 teachers’ learning in the workforce. Her third area focuses on aging and adult education, including senior immigrants’ learning, gerontechnology, and smart aging.

She published numerous peer-reviewed academic papers in prestigious journals, including Adult Education Quarterly, International Journal of Lifelong Education, Globalization, Societies and Education, Disability and Society, and British Journal of Social Work. She is well versed in quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic research methods. She also served as reviewers for many journals, such as Adult Education Quarterly, Journal of Asian Public Policy, International Migration, and Social Work Research. She is a mother and has lived in different cities, including Wenzhou, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Toronto, Aix-en-Provence and San Marcos.