When Dr. Dhardon Sharling first attended school as a child, her classroom had no walls or roof. Growing up in a Tibetan refugee camp in northern India, she and other children gathered for class under a tree.
“I always thought across the world classrooms are like this,” she recalled, “Overlooking snow-capped mountains.”
That experience as a refugee in exile has shaped her view of the world. And, as a new faculty member in the UMass Amherst Communication Department, it is at the heart of her thinking about how students learn.
Students themselves “are a sight of knowledge,” she said. “That’s why every class session that I lead, I will always foreground each individual students’ lived experiences,” including their early life and cultural backgrounds.
This year she is teaching two courses in communication: Communication for Sustainable Social Change and Communication of Ecology and Sustainability. She also teaches courses in media literacy and writing.
In a recent meeting of one of her communication classes, Sharling discussed how alarming headlines about climate change can lead the public to think there’s nothing that can be done because “the time bomb is already ticking.”
But she emphasized to her students that a bleak headline is actually an opportunity to reframe communication strategies to move the public towards “hope and aspiration.”
“Turn the challenges into opportunities,” she explained.
This goes hand in hand with her two primary goals as an innovative and visionary educator. The first is to engage with her students to impact positive change whether that’s on an individual, community or structural level.
“That’s my guiding philosophy, not just as a teacher or researcher, but in life,” she said.
Her second goal links back to her early days as a young refugee: to encourage her students to make the most of their education.
“I just feel it’s such a privilege to be in a Western university,” she said. “You don’t want to waste what is offered to you.”
She champions learning and education as the most transformative tools offered to people.
“They’re a lifeline,” she said.
Her own education reflects a passion for learning in multiple disciplines. Sharling earned her BA in English literature and an MA in Communication, both from Madras University in India, and an MSc in Counseling Studies at the University of Edinburgh. After working as a Tibetan rights activist for nine years, she joined the graduate program in Communication at UMass Amherst where she earned her doctorate in 2023.
Her current research examines how communication can advance social change, with particular attention to gender and climate justice.
She brings a wealth of lived experience to her scholarship.
“Drawing on intersections among communication studies, new media, critical feminist theory, cultural anthropology, and lived experience, I seek to generate knowledge that challenges and intervenes in systemic structures of power and injustice,” she writes.
Sharling also actively reflects on the power dynamics in her own classroom, taking a “decolonial” approach, “where the instructor is not all knowledgeable,” she said.
She believes in “decentering knowledge,” carving out classroom time to listen to students and validate what each has to offer.
“Every time I come into class, I walk out like a student who has learned,” she said to a recent group of writing students, telling them how much she gets from their writing.
“I’m transported into a completely different world, and I see a wealth of knowledge. There’s so much for me to take away,” she said.