Dr. Patricia Liu Baergen holds her doctoral (Ph.D.) degree in Curriculum Studies from the University of British Columbia. Her award-winning research is firmly rooted in the field of curriculum theory/sizing and informed by the continental philosophy of Martin Heidegger. One of her fundamental publications, a book titled, Tracing Ted Tetsuo Aoki’s Intellectual Formation: Historical, Societal and Phenomenological Influence, illustrates and explores the life, works and influences of a renowned Japanese Canadian curriculum theorist Ted Tetsuo Aoki. In this work, Dr. Liu Baergen attends to the interwoven, dynamic, and poetic style of this Japanese Canadian curriculum theorist’s life history and intellectual formation, particularly the historical, societal and phenomenological influences on his scholarship. Dr. Liu Baergen delves into the historical present that juxtaposes history, society, and subjectivity to situate a curriculum theorist's life and works within contemporary Canadian curriculum studies. She addresses nationally specific situations and illustrates how a thinker’s life and thoughts are embodied in the larger social, cultural, and political space.

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Along this line of work, Dr. Liu Baergen’s research pays special attention to curricular issues such as equity, identity politics and social justice in education. She believes a curriculum realm is where teachers and students live(d) experiences, intellectual traditions, and cultures interplay. In turn, Dr. Liu Baergen believes that personhood and live(d) experiences of both educators and students are not just innocuous educational experiences but are crucial places of contact in engaging a complicated conversation for educational questions and intercultural relations. She strives to create a space of “belonging” for students to engage in such complicated conversations. Dr. Liu Baergen points out that the space of “belonging” is not an homage to the sameness of being together. Rather, dwelling where we are and listening to each other’s stories in different languages, cultures and beliefs is an extension of a gift to each other. Her aspiration is that if we can attune to one another, catch sight, or hear the sound of our being in our essential togetherness that rests not in sameness but in human dwelling in this place of belonging. Through dwelling in-between, the juxtaposition of our own place stories as lived curriculum, she hopes to explore curriculum as an autobiographical inquiry of lived experiences that can disclose the existential texture of the beings that teachers and students come to be.

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Learning/research, as putting forth an inquiry to question and reflect upon students’ own live(d) experiences, understandings, actions, and practices, is a fundamental value of her teaching philosophy. To facilitate this, her pedagogical approach draws from the critical pedagogy and existential-phenomenology traditions that build on the narrative inquiry method, which, she believes, encourages students to ask critical questions and reflect upon their life (d) experiences, (dis)beliefs and their practices. Through the phenomenological ethos, learning/research becomes a mode of inquiry that allows students to embrace the investigation and description of phenomena as experience(d).

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Dr. Liu Baergen looks forward to walking alongside students in their journey of becoming and their search for meaning through phenomenological, conceptual, and philosophical approaches.