Yue is a PhD researcher in the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sussex, supervised by Dr Rachel Burr, Professor Robin Banerjee and Dr Dave Smalley.

Yue’s doctoral project explores the developmental pathways of adolescents’ social and emotional competences (SECs) in interdisciplinary classrooms in China. Using youth participatory action research, she examines students’ authentic participation and interaction in lessons, observes how their social and emotional competences are expressed in specific classroom contexts, analyses the curricular features and influencing factors that support SECs in interdisciplinary teaching, and evaluates the effectiveness of youth participatory action research in promoting adolescents’ social and emotional development.

Building on this work, she hopes to support adolescents in developing social and emotional competences alongside their academic attainment, provide practical and actionable insights for educational practice in China, contribute to the exploration of contextually grounded approaches to SEL, and offer empirical cases from the Chinese context to the international research community.