Teach.

I want my students to feel that science is immediately relevant, instead of a plug-and-chug cookbook exercise. You don’t have to wait until graduate school to “do science.” I cultivate critical thinking through active learning, and expose students to current techniques and paradigms to foster practicing scientists. As a teacher, I use three strategies to initiate students into the greater scientific community: (1) I show students that there is no single type of person who is a scientist, (2) I cultivate a classroom culture where students feel safe and encouraged to engage in discussion, and (3) I challenge students to engage in authentic scientific research.

Experience

I began teaching gifted high school students at the NC Governor’s School in 2011. In my Biodiversity class (see syllabus), students first established the ground rules of ecology as they apply to the visible world by comparing biodiversity patterns at three sites on Salem College campus. Every summer I heard students describe their focal habitat to peers in other disciplines, and point out the plants and animals they continue to recognize and monitor throughout the summer, illustrating their continued ownership of the project. Next, students cultured soil microbes from each habitat to investigate symbiosis with plants. Our protocol was published as part of an ongoing citizen science partnership with the Dunn lab at NC State University. After joining the Dunn lab as a postdoctoral researcher, I re-vamped my course to focus on Microbial Ecology (see syllabus) and developed a novel lab to culture flour microbes, complementary to the global Sourdough Project. Many of the inquiry-based leaning modules I developed for the NC Governor’s School have since been adapted for use in undergraduate and graduate classes across the country (e.g., Sourdough for Science).

In Spring 2015 I co-taught a graduate-level course at Duke University with Biology Department Chair Mohamed Noor and three other graduate students. Professional Development for Careers in Biology was funded by the Duke Graduate School and designed to address a dearth of departmental professional development offerings (see prospective and retrospective blog posts). We aimed to help ourselves and our peers understand what career options are available and to match our skills, interests, and values to both academic and nonacademic careers. The course was well-received, and empowered our peers to investigate and enter the job market (see Bio790 evaluations). “Bio Boot Camp” has since become a staple course for Biology PhDs, as well as a model for other departments and divisions within Duke University. I have also incorporated the “Boot Camp” materials into Introduction to Biological Research for graduate students at NC State University.

In Spring 2016, I was awarded a Bass Teaching Fellowship to develop an undergraduate microbiome course based on my dissertation research (see syllabus and blog post), for which I won the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Microbiome research impacts our understanding of host-microbial symbiosis and disease, and as such is highly relevant to the large population of Duke undergraduate students who hope to pursue either basic science or medical careers. However, the interdisciplinary nature of the field — as well as rapid advances in sequencing technology and analytical methods — requires that students achieve a firm grasp of methodological principles, analyze large data sets, and evaluate the results judiciously. To accomplish these goals, my students evaluated primary literature, interacted with diverse microbiome researchers, and completed novel research projects instead of mid-term or final exams. At the end of the semester, one student appreciated that there was "more intellectual freedom in this course than is typical of an undergraduate course so I feel like I was more engaged in learning." (See BIO 490S evaluations.)

Since July 2019, I have re-designed three existing courses at NCSU (AEC 460: Field Ecology, AEC 400: Applied Ecology, and AEC 502: Introduction to Biological Research) and developed a new, “flipped” course (AEC 295: Global Conservation Ecology) in collaboration with Dr. Diana Lafferty at Northern Michigan University. My scholarly efforts to build long-lasting reciprocal and participatory partnerships with my students as well as community members have been recently recognized with the inaugural Engaged Scholarship Award (2020) and the Outstanding Engagement Award (2021).

Methodology

I learn everyone’s name and preferred pronouns on the first day of class. I read a land acknowledgement statement crediting the Catawba nation as the original inhabitants of what is now NCSU campus, and pledge my intent to decolonize science by empowering students to become stewards of their own education. I tell students that scientists are not defined by knowing all the answers, but by how they tackle unsolved questions. I can guide students through concepts and material that I know, but I acknowledge that students will likely ask questions I won’t be able to answer. In those cases, we can use research tools to try to find an answer together. My candid introduction provides a non-threatening venue for students to offer varied perspectives born of their diverse academic and personal backgrounds. Across the semester, I integrate assignments that require and motivate students to develop transferable skills that have professional value beyond the classroom (see course mapping). Literature review, data analysis in R, and data visualization can all be applied across disciplines toward an array of careers in academia and industry. Many of the assignments are also iterative, to deliberately integrate reflection and time-management. By the end of the course, I want my students to feel confident in their knowledge and skills, and prepared for the next stage in their chosen academic / career path (see NCSU student evaluations).

My course design challenges students with greater autonomy than they are accustomed to in a traditional classroom setting. Millennial students are not limited by access to content; I focus, instead, on using active learning to help students connect information to discover important underlying concepts (see Faculty Evaluation Forms). A typical “lecture” is punctuated with critical thinking challenges to interpret a relevant figure and engage in group discussion. These “cogitation breaks” enable me to check for student comprehension, and correct misconceptions before they take root; but I also take advantage of these opportunities to highlight case studies from the “real world.” My examples highlight scientists from diverse backgrounds and emphasize the many ways that course concepts manifest across systems and scales – including traditions practiced by indigenous peoples across the globe.

Facilitating these types of class-wide exchange not only fosters a collaborative environment, but also empowers students by emphasizing the importance of their individual contributions during informal, real-time, formative assessment via hands-on activities that make global issues personally relevant. For example – in Global Conservation Ecology, students collected and weighed their trash and recycling for a week to measure and extrapolate their personal impact. More recently, students mapped which specific ecosystem services are provided by green and blue spaces in Raleigh, and compared park distribution to median income, bus lines, and greenways, to investigate environmental justice (i.e., who pays for ecosystem services, versus who can actually access them). These exercises challenge students to critically curate and analyze class data in Excel, and to apply concepts from the textbook to real-world contexts at the local and individual level. In Applied Ecology, students worked through a series of case studies to practice interpreting ecological datasets from my own ongoing research projects (e.g., the microbial communities in sourdough starters, evolutionary drivers of gut and mammary morphology). We also completed weekly “jigsaw” exercises to synthesize published research and apply a single concept (e.g., predation) across diverse systems (e.g., raptors, mammals, arthropods, agriculture) to identify common themes versus context-dependent distinctions. In Field Ecology, after completing a series of short-term (1-day) labs to practice field methods and data analysis, students worked in groups to design and execute original research projects over an 8-week period. Students designed each project to address a gap in the published literature, and presented their results to an audience of peers and professionals (i.e., silvaculturalist Liz Snider and the Burkholder lab). While students may initially be intimidated by the responsibility of leading discussion and designing their own experiments, my teaching approach empowers participants to take initiative as independent thinkers and collaborative scientists (see GSW Student Evaluations).

Professional Development

I solicit feedback across the semester, and compile longitudinal feedback when possible, to track my own progress as an instructor and to identify ways to improve my teaching (see GSW Student Evaluations from 2012 and Bio202L Student Evaluations from 2013 and 2014). I completed the Certificate of College Teaching and the Preparing Future Faculty fellowship at Duke University to enhance my teaching approach with perspectives from other departments and institutions. I have participated in domestic and international conferences on Transforming STEM Education and Creative Science Teaching. I have also attended a variety of Teaching Ideas workshops (at Duke), and GLBT Advocate training sessions (at Duke and NCSU) to ensure that my classroom and pedagogy are inclusive for all students. I further developed my research and teaching skills as a postdoc in the Dunn lab at NCSU, where I translated my research on fermented foods to lesson plans, SciStarter projects, blog posts, and workshops as part of the Students Discover citizen science initiative. Since joining Applied Ecology as faculty in July 2019, I have joined the Office of Faculty Development reading circles to learn how to integrate Universal Design for Learning and effective support for socially marginalized students into my classes. In December 2019, I hosted a departmental teaching workshop (the first of its kind at NCSU) to build community by sharing successes and strategies, and documenting institutional knowledge in a curated repository of best practices. I have also been invited to participate in several interdisciplinary teaching programs including the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning Institute (2020), Open Pedagogy Incubator (2020), STEMBUILD NSF RCN (2021), and HHMI Inclusive Excellence workshops (2021). As I implement new approaches, I have gathered data and presented my findings to local (NCSU Teaching & Learning Symposium), national (Ecological Society of America Learning Discovery Conference), and international (Lilly International Teaching & Learning Conference) audiences. Each of these tactics reinforces my overall goals and enables me to constantly improve my teaching.