【Words from a Distinguished Teacher】

• There is no greater good than educating others; education and governance must be grounded in integrity, take joy in imparting knowledge, and be rooted in selflessness.
• Design for the people, educate talent for the nation—this is the original aspiration that brought me to the podium, and the belief I uphold throughout my life.
• Educating students is like cultivating a garden: only by teaching according to individual aptitude and guiding with sensitivity to context can a flourishing educational ecosystem be achieved.
• Teaching is not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the ignition of thinking; design is not just drawing, but the construction of the future.

Dialoguing with Poetic Landscapes: Innovations in Teaching Reform from Garden Making to Future Habitat Design

For more than 20 years, Wang Yun has been deeply engaged in teaching reform in design education. He has led the development of a series of university-level first-class undergraduate courses, municipal key courses, and curriculum ideological-and-political reform flagship courses, including History of Gardens, Landscape Architecture Planning and Design, and Landscape Architecture Design I & II. Courses he participated in developing—Landscape Art and History of Western Landscape Architecture—have been recognized as National First-Class Undergraduate Courses.

He is the chief editor of the textbook Urban Green Space System Planning, now in its fifth reprint and selected as a high-quality textbook for the national “14th Five-Year Plan” for landscape architecture programs. Another textbook, Landscape Art: Landscape Elements and Design Principles, was printed seven times in its first edition alone and has been adopted by more than 40 universities nationwide.

Upholding the teaching philosophy of “integration of science and art, advancing far through principles,” Wang Yun has centered Landscape Architecture Design I & II as the backbone of instruction and innovatively constructed a “three-stage progressive, in-class and extracurricular integrated” modular and continuous design curriculum system. This system enables coordinated integration across parallel design courses through four instructional phases (scenario creation – task definition – autonomous and collaborative learning – outcome evaluation) and six instructional nodes, effectively cultivating students’ comprehensive planning, design, and innovative thinking capabilities.

His teaching achievements have won the Second Prize of the Shanghai Municipal Teaching Achievement Award and the Grand Prize of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Teaching Achievement Award. Over the past three years, he has organized more than 20 teaching exchanges, research activities, and intensive course development workshops, exploring open, collaborative, and smoothly coordinated teaching operation models. The teaching team has secured three provincial- or ministerial-level teaching research projects and one university-level project, and has received the Second Prize (Collective) of the SJTU “Teaching Excellence Award” and the title of Outstanding Grassroots Teaching Organization.

Advocating that “learning should advance in tandem with practice, and growth should align with the profession,” Wang Yun continuously promotes innovation in practice-based teaching. He has developed a teacher–student co-growth mechanism and iterative teaching cases through a “Case Workshop” model. Across foundational and core courses—from History of Gardens to Landscape Architecture Planning and Design—he has established a three-tiered, multi-dimensional, open case resource system, providing critical support for students’ integrated design logic throughout their education.

Guiding young faculty members and students from different academic years, he has led projects ranging from Zuibaichi Garden in Songjiang to the SJTU campus, from the Huangpu River waterfront to Chongming Dongtan, and from aging urban neighborhoods to underdeveloped mountainous regions. This has formed an interactive “teaching–research–practice” innovation system. Course works and collaborative design projects have won more than 20 international and domestic design awards and have been selected for the Venice Biennale and United Nations Sustainable Development outstanding cases.

Wang Yun emphasizes that landscape architects should be “creators of poetic dwelling and leaders of cultural heritage.” In response to the transformation of MLA (international master’s) education, he pioneered the course Eastern Garden Design, focusing on the exploration and inheritance of the spiritual essence of traditional Chinese garden culture. The course has become one of the most popular among students and has been widely presented at national teaching conferences.

For the new undergraduate major in Human Habitat Design, he has focused on the forward-looking and complex nature of “future habitats,” centering on Human Habitat Design Studio I – Biophilic Landscape Design. Addressing trends in digital landscapes in the era of artificial intelligence, he has developed integrated online, offline, and virtual-simulation teaching resources combining knowledge, skills, and values.

Co-Creating with Students: Cultivating Innovative Designers with Deep National Commitment

When he first stepped onto the podium, Wang Yun pledged himself to the ideal of “design for the people, educating talent for the nation.” From youth to maturity, he has remained committed to cultivating philosopher-artisans of Chinese landscape architecture, steadfast in the belief that teaching ultimately serves the purpose of nurturing people.

He holds a distinctive view of design talent, believing that not only frontline designers, but also industry managers and comprehensive administrators with design thinking and engineering awareness, can be excellent designers. Above all, he values the cultivation of students’ aesthetic sensibility, design thinking, and innovative consciousness.

In the first class of Landscape Architecture Design I each year, he tells students that if they cannot yet achieve—or may not achieve for a long time—“high vision and high execution,” they must at least strive for “high vision with modest execution,” and never become craftsmen with “low vision but high execution.” In his eyes, every student interested in design has the potential to succeed. Drawing inspiration from the classical Chinese garden principle “winding paths leading to secluded beauty, excellence lies in appropriateness,” he encourages students to pursue diverse paths to success and to find their own direction and positioning. This, perhaps, is his embodiment of inclusive education and differentiated instruction.

As Head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the School of Design, Wang Yun has worked closely with successive Party branch secretaries to advance curriculum-based ideological and political education. He has developed the “Tongxin Garden” (Shared-Heart Garden) teacher–student Party-building co-construction model, integrating moral education with aesthetic cultivation—embedding virtue in beauty and shaping people through beauty.

Guided by Party building, he has innovatively explored industry–education integration models. Relying on scenic road and tourism highway projects in Jing County and Liyang City, he has extended student learning beyond the classroom, establishing “Tongxin Garden” aesthetic education second classrooms in both locations. By integrating Party-building elements into professional education through collaborative activities and university–local cooperation, he has achieved deep integration of ideological education and disciplinary training, empowering talent support systems for rural revitalization.

These achievements were consolidated into “The ‘Way’ of Rural Revitalization through Ecological Empowerment and Integrated Tourism and Transportation—Two Typical Tourism Highway Cases in the Yangtze River Delta.” All five developed teaching cases were selected into the Ministry of Education’s “Beautiful China” thematic case database. A guided student project, “Training Rural CEOs: Design Empowering Beautiful Villages in the Yangtze River Delta,” won the Grand Prize at the 2024 “Zhixing Cup” Shanghai University Student Social Practice Competition, and Wang Yun received the Outstanding Teacher Award.

Under his leadership, landscape architecture students at SJTU have won all major international and domestic design awards, with total awards ranking among the top three nationwide. Many graduates have entered leading design institutions such as Huajian Group and Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute, becoming industry leaders. In the inaugural selection of Shanghai Outstanding Young Engineering Survey and Design Professionals and Shanghai Top Ten Outstanding Young Landscape Architects, SJTU graduates accounted for 8 of the 30 awardees, five of whom were Wang Yun’s former graduate students or undergraduate thesis advisees.

Some graduates have been seconded to the Xiong’an New Area Administrative Committee Planning Research Center, leading major projects such as the Xiong’an New Area Green Space Special Plan, Baiyangdian Wetland Ecological Restoration Plan, and East–West Axis Architectural and Landscape Urban Design. Others have become specialists in exhibition garden design, completing Shanghai exhibition gardens for the 2019 Beijing World Horticultural Expo, 2020 China Green Expo, and 2024 Chengdu World Horticultural Expo, showcasing Shanghai-style gardens and ecological civilization achievements to the world.

In recent years, a group of SJTU landscape graduates with global aspirations has emerged: three joined grassroots positions in central and western China as selected graduates, contributing to poverty alleviation and rural revitalization; one works at the FAO Representation in China; and one serves as a centrally selected official at the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (National Park Administration)—all applying design thinking to the construction of a Beautiful China.

Advancing Together: From Disciplinary Transformation to Global Recognition

Serving as Head of the Department and Discipline Leader for more than 20 years, Wang Yun has overseen two major transitions of the landscape architecture undergraduate program—from agriculture-oriented to engineering-oriented, and then to integrated engineering–humanities–agriculture—along with the exploration of MLA (international master’s) education and the new major in Human Habitat Design. These reforms, though challenging, forged today’s SJTU landscape architecture program. Among faculty and leadership, he is regarded as both the “engine of reform” and the “stabilizer of morale.”

On the night of March 16, 2018, he wrote an open letter to all department faculty, which some still keep today. During the department’s transition from the School of Agriculture and Biology to the School of Design, faculty without design backgrounds faced difficult choices. Speaking as a veteran landscape architect, he held one-on-one discussions with every teacher and, late that weekend night, wrote a letter emphasizing unity, resilience, and shared purpose, calling on the department to build landscape architecture into a mainstream discipline of SJTU design within three to five years. Asked later why he did so, he replied: “The fate of teachers is inseparable from the development of their discipline.” His sense of responsibility and cohesion enabled the department’s collective transition.

Wang Yun places great emphasis on nurturing young faculty. He has partnered with younger colleagues such as Yu Bingqin, Chen Dan, Zhang Yang, and Chang Xiangqi, implementing a mentorship model integrating senior, mid-career, and junior faculty. This has formed a closed-loop cultivation system of “competition-driven teaching and integrated training.” Young faculty have won four major awards, including the AI Special Excellence Course Award from the Global MOOC and Online Education Alliance and First Prize in the National University Teaching Innovation Competition (New Liberal Arts category). Joint achievements in course development, student competitions, and co-supervised graduation projects have been significant.

Over two decades, guided by the philosophy of “cultivating philosopher-artisans for the era and designing a Beautiful China,” Wang Yun has led successful applications for major reform initiatives such as the Outstanding Agriculture and Forestry Talent Education and Training Program (Landscape Architecture) and the New Agriculture Discipline Reform Project on Sustainable Rural-Oriented Landscape Architecture. He has constructed a talent cultivation model featuring dual-faculty support, panoramic drivers, and four-stage progression.

In discipline development, he pioneered a reform centered on sustainable landscape and ecological design, optimizing faculty structures, refining core directions, and deepening integration with ecology and geography. The internationalized, interdisciplinary, and professionalized MLA education reform has been reported by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Continuous reform aligned with the needs of “Beautiful China” and “People’s City” initiatives has revitalized the discipline, earning recognition as a national pioneer in landscape architecture disciplinary reform.

After years of perseverance, SJTU’s landscape architecture program was invited in 2023 to participate in professional international accreditation by the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Following more than a year of evaluation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University became the only invited institution in China and the only institution worldwide to pass as a pilot unit.

【Profile of a Distinguished Teacher】

Wang Yun is the recipient of the First Prize of the 2025 Shanghai Jiao Tong University “Teaching Excellence Award.” He is a Professor (Practice-Oriented) and PhD Supervisor at the School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and serves as a member of the National Steering Committee for Professional Graduate Education in Landscape Architecture, as well as Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Society of Landscape Architecture. He joined the Department of Landscape Architecture in 1997 and has taught landscape architecture planning and design for over 30 years, serving more than 20 years as Deputy Head and Head of the Department. An educator who measures China’s landscapes with his footsteps and illuminates students’ design journeys with wisdom, he has cultivated a generation of influential designers and received the Second Prize of the Shanghai Municipal Teaching Achievement Award, the Grand Prize of the SJTU Teaching Achievement Award, and more than 80 domestic and international design awards.

Contributing Units: Faculty Affairs Office School of Design News Center

Translated by: Rebecca

Proofread by: Denise