I was awarded a Ph.D. Minor in Teaching in 2020 from the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Biological Sciences. In order to complete the minor I: attended several years of pedagogy training, taught multiple courses, designed and executed two teaching projects, guest lectured, developed a teaching portfolio, designed an undergraduate research course, and received one-on-one training from two teaching mentors. In addition to my in-classroom experience, I also served as a mentor for several undergraduate students in a research settling.
The first engineering course I took in undergrad was an introductory course to Biomedical Engineering, which covered broad strokes of biology, engineering, and philosophy of both research and engineering. At the end of the first day the question was posed to us: Is it our responsibility as scientists and engineers to fight misinformation? The final of that class had a question to argue what responsibilities one has to depose misinformation?
I believe that as a person who has been privileged to learn so much, to have been able to study underneath brilliant individuals such as Dr. Hendrix and Dr. Durrant, that it is my responsibility to give that knowledge freely that was freely given to me. That it is my responsibility to use that privilege to educate those who desire to learn as well as to fight those who spread misinformation.
My primary goal in teaching is to inspire higher level thought from my students. Of course, conferring the basic knowledge of the course is a required component of this, but getting a student to engage with that material in a manner that goes beyond simple knowledge is my vision of successful education. In the ongoing debate between growth-verses-proficiency evaluation, I lean towards a growth-based approach.
During my first TA assignment at the University of Pittsburgh, I taught a biology lab class, which involved protein purification, kinetics, phage biology, and mutagenesis. My students had a wide range of topics and experiments to learn and perform.
One pair of students, had never done any wet lab work, and at the end of the semester they were competent with aseptic techniques. Educating these students on how to think and act as a biologist required tremendous efforts, often extending beyond the class time allotment, but in the end, they could join any biochemistry lab and be able to perform the required experiments.
Another student started the semester with excellent wet lab techniques but at his first presentation listed off the results of his kinetic experiments as if they were conclusions. By the end of the semester, his experimental conclusions were involved dissections and interpretations of the data he had been collecting. His growth in his ability to think about the data was a highlight of my semester.