Published: Oct 12, 2020 by Chloe
As part of the process of receiving formal training on STEM teaching at the college level, I conducted this informal, introspective interview with myself to help inspire the beginnings of a teaching philosophy. The formal training is through CIRTL (The Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning), which endeavors to bring evidence-based practices to undergraduate STEM education.
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Why are you becoming a teacher?
I am becoming a teacher because I love learning, and teaching and learning are inseparable in my mind. One facilitates the other and both are a process of growth. I am not aspiring necessarily to help educate the next generation of scientists; rather I want to help individuals become self-actualized and engage with the world armed with critical thinking and agency. Teaching also helps me do the same.
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What is the most important goal you have as a teacher?
The most important goal I have as a teacher is to empower students’ agency. I want students to know that they are capable of learning and to feel that they can make something out of the knowledge they have, whatever that may be. This is especially important to me in STEM teaching, where the necessity of knowing factual information runs the risk of suppressing creative and individualistic thought.
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Recall a teacher whom you admire. Why do you admire them?
Though bell hooks is a teacher I have not had personally in a classroom setting, I admire her and am inspired by her as I explore my own relationship with teaching. I recently read her book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.” In her essays, she fights the model of education where a teacher is like a radio tower transmitting information to passive receivers. She believes that the purpose of teaching is to enable students to think critically and challenge sitting aspects of society. A potent example in her work is teaching issues of race and gender in order to empower students to confront white supremacy and patriarchy. I believe similar approaches can be applied to neuroscience education, where learning about how the brain works can enable students to scrutinize and challenge conventions in scientific, societal, or personal conceptualizations of the mind.
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What motivates you to learn?
I am motivated to learn in order to feel engaged with the world. This engagement is empowering to me. The more I learn about how the world works, the more connected to it I feel. The more connected I feel, the more energized and empowered I am to make something of my knowledge and experiences. In turn, these acts of creation help me learn new things and discover new areas of the world that I want to connect with, which fuels this cycle of learning, engagement, and creation.
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What has been your most successful teaching (or teaching-related) experience? Why?
My senior year of college, I was a teaching assistant for a junior-level psychology course called Experimental Methods. This course was designed to teach students the basics of experimental design and statistical analysis. The course also served to prepare students for their senior capstone project, which for many meant conducting a small experiment and presenting the findings. I was offered the opportunity to TA this course as I had performed well on my own capstone project, even though my performance in the course itself my own junior year had been mediocre. I think this experience of moving from a mediocre performance to a successful capstone enabled me to help others learn and implement the necessary concepts. I consider this my most successful teaching experience because I know that it made a strong difference for at least one student. At the conclusion of the course, this student made me dinner out of gratitude for how much I helped him understand the material and inspired his own capstone project.
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What do you believe are your strengths as an educator? (Include an example experience that supports this and describe it.)
STEM learning has not been a straightforward process for me. I grew up in the humanities, surrounded by theatre and literature and art. Science has been somewhat of a second language, and I still am learning the grammar of technicalities. Because of this, the feeling of not understanding, of approaching something new for the first time, is a routine part of my professional experience and never far from my mind. The primary way I have understood declarative knowledge, upon which much of science is based, has been by building up a piece of information from the basics and then imbuing it with meaning. These two things - the freshness of not knowing, and the way I approach understanding - I believe have given me my strengths as an educator. I am able to empathize with students’ feelings of not knowing, of pre-understanding, and be patient and nonjudgmental with that stage. I also avoid making assumptions about what student know and instead build a message piece by piece starting with the basics. This gives students solid ground upon which to stand as they extend themselves a little bit farther during the process of learning something new. I also always try to relate a piece of information to a “why”. In the context of neuroscience, this why is often about how a particular fact is meaningful in the context of brain function, which almost always can be related back to lived experience. For example, I recently delivered a lecture about neuroplasticity. When preparing the lecture, I remembered a time in grad school when I was trying to devise an experiment related to neuroplasticity. My advisor asked me what I meant by that term, and I couldn’t really answer clearly, settling for a vague description of rewiring. With this in mind, I started the lecture by describing what neurons are actually doing when they are plastic, instead of assuming that the term can speak for itself. I went on to ask the class to supply real-life examples of neuroplasticity in action in order to relate this concept back to lived experience and why this is an important phenomenon to study and understand.
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What do you expect will occur because of your teaching? How will you know if this occurs?
I expect students will be able to build links between factual knowledge, creative applications of that knowledge, and personal meaning. This could be thought of as the “what”, “how”, and “why” of information. In a course that I teach, I would want to make this intention clear to students so that they can keep each of these aspects in mind as they learn something new. To determine if these links are occurring, I would want to prompt students throughout the semester with questions about each of these three aspects. More informally, I think that student engagement (asking questions, coming to office hours, generating ideas) would also indicate that these links are being built.
