In a small classroom, students are reviewing English vocabulary together with their teacher, who writes the words on a whiteboard with a thick blue marker. But in a classic NYU Shanghai twist, the teacher is actually a sophomore, and the students are campus security guards.
Part of a series of Community Engaged Learning initiatives to forge meaningful connections among the NYU Shanghai community, the English classes—taught by student volunteers—are offered to service staff members who are looking to build their vocabulary.
Language barriers on campus can make communicating difficult but the classes are helping bridge gaps. It’s also a chance for staff to grow professionally and express themselves.
Xin Zhonghua, who has worked at the West Gate as a security guard for the past three years, says he signed up to improve his communication with foreign visitors. “Before when foreigners would talk to me, I just didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I’m learning English that I can use in my job.”
In class, Lawrence Sun ’28 drills Xin and his classmates on useful vocabulary—north, south, east, west—and laughs as they tease and joke with each other. When the guards struggle to enunciate phrases in English, like ‘fourth floor,’ Lawrence offers reinforcement through targeted repetition.
Xin says the training is helping. “Now, even though I can’t understand all of what they say, I can understand a few key words here and there, like ‘teacher’, ‘student,’ ‘staff,’ ‘visitor,’ ‘bus,’ ‘west,’ ‘east.’ This is a huge help for my work,” he says.
Across campus, in another classroom, 50-year-old Wang Yingxia, a former NYU Shanghai cafeteria worker who has dropped by campus for a visit, is practicing her English.
“I really love learning,” says Wang, speaking English slowly and deliberately. “My English is not very good. I learned a little in school, but I forgot.” Wang describes teaching herself by watching short video content in English on her phone, until last year, when a chance encounter with Zhu Ziyi ’26 in the cafeteria sparked an unexpected friendship.
“We can learn English together,” encouraged Ziyi, whose first language is Chinese. In their first lesson, Ziyi taught her 'beef ramen,' 'noodles,' 'rice,' 'breakfast,' 'lunch,' and 'dinner,' but that was just the beginning. Even after she left to study away at NYU Abu Dhabi, the two continued their lessons over WeChat.
Their impromptu classes inspired CEL to recruit more student volunteers and design curriculum from scratch to offer regular English classes to service staff last summer. Now, CEL holds four weekly classes, with four student volunteers and seven staff members attending.
Shreya Jaisingh ’26 from Chicago, who now teaches Wang, says she wanted to form a personal connection with the cleaning staff on campus, whom she and other students affectionately refer to as ayis and shu-shus (aunties and uncles in Mandarin). “They work countless hours, they’re here morning till night, even after we leave,” she says. “They’re so giving to us they should be given something in return.”
Shreya shows off some of the scrapbooks that she is putting together with her students, arranged in class with photos that they send her and which she prints ahead of their lesson. “Last week we were doing appearance and looks and how to identify people,” she says. “They have good foundations [in English], so now it is about applying it to their own life."
Language learning goes both ways, and is at the core of another program run by CEL and the Chinese Language program where service staff members and students meet up weekly for a 20-minutes of casual conversation in Chinese. “We want to foster personal connections and a sense of belonging among all members of the NYU Shanghai community through these initiatives,” says Susan Dai from CEL, who adds that students have reported feeling greater empathy and building genuine bonds with the staff. “We always put connections with people as a top priority.”
In another CEL initiative, service staff members and students are bonding through art creation. This semester, Assistant Arts Professor of Visual Arts Maya Kramer organized monthly art workshops for 14 cleaning staff members and 10 student volunteers. The workshops serve as a stress-free space for learning art, stimulating creativity and experimenting with new mediums.
Professor Kramer introduces art principles during the workshops but says the activities are really about bringing the staff and students together to collaborate and build connections. “Art can go beyond personal expression and actually serve a community,” she says.
In one workshop, Kramer led the participants in a workshop on negative and positive space and the principles of composition. The participants got to work, quietly tracing and cutting out shapes from hand-dyed papers and arranging them them on black construction paper. Minutes later, they cracked jokes with each other, filling the room with laughter as they worked on their collages.
Lv Lianyun, who has worked at NYU Shanghai for more than a decade, says she enjoys the opportunity to make art and build friendships with students. “It makes us feel more connected and more familiar with each other,” she says. “Just the other day, some of the students ran up to me in the hall to say hello and catch up.”
Next semester, the art workshops will begin planning and creating a mural to beautify the cleaning staff’s windowless break room in B3. “I hope we can bring a more vibrant energy to the space,” Kramer says. The workshop participants will decide on the imagery to use and create it together.
Lin Runjie ’28 says he enjoys learning about art and the creative process in the workshops. “The production of artwork is not solely an individual's work; it requires communication and collaboration,” he says. “This creates a sense of belonging and makes me feel that in front of art, everyone is equally important.”