Teaching
PHILOSOPHY
Ecological science is about understanding the world around you and your role in a natural and human world. Engaging students in the study of ecosystems to create empowered, educated citizens is essential in the rapidly changing era of the Anthropocene. It is my goal to get my students excited about learning science and challenge them to engage with the content in ways that are relevant to their life and interests, to foster critical thinking through field visits and discussions, and to teach them to evaluate and communicate scientific information. The courses I teach are designed to provide students with tools to understand and participate in scientific discourse about ecology and environmental science more broadly. With these objectives in mind, I design my courses around active engagement through field trips and in class discussions with many opportunities for written reflections, and scientific communication through diverse media.
As an educator, I aim to facilitate broad engagement in science through an inclusive and adaptive teaching style, meeting individual students needs. To ensure this, (1) I create curriculum that draws on diverse, real world examples and communicate it through varied means to make the science accessible across student backgrounds and aptitudes, (2) approach all courses with a focus on student outcomes, and (3) solicit and implement feedback to continually revise and improve my teaching.
EXPERIENCE
Mentoring Undergraduate Projects
As a postdoc at the Flathead Lake Biological Station I mentor undergraduate students working on independent research projects during the summer.
Teaching Assistantships
At Duke, I have been a TA for Field Ecology (Bio 360) for two semesters. This is an advanced, field-based course with 12-15 students. Students learn to make observations and develop scientific questions about ecosystems with my hands-on guidance in the field. The students are encouraged to submit re-writes on their written work; as the TA, I provide feedback on the first drafts to help them develop their writing skills. Through this course, I have become familiar with the expected content of a 300-level science class and the abilities of a typical student enrolled at this level. Student feedback from both semesters has helped me focus on my strengths of individual mentoring and inspiring enthusiasm in the classroom and work on improving in other areas. In Spring 2021, I am the TA for Ecology (Bio 209), which is an introductory course for biology majors with ~60 students. I assist students with in class activities and with understanding and applying the material they learn on their individual projects that they complete three times throughout the semester. On multiple occasions, I have guest lectured for this class, teaching the topics of nutrient cycling and ecosystems ecology, incorporating themes from my own research. Because spring 2021 has been conducted entirely online, I incorporated breakout room activities where the students read papers in a jigsaw fashion and were able to discuss with their peers who had read the same paper and then share with the other students who had read different papers.
Before starting at Duke, I worked for a year as a full-time professional TA for the Semester in Environmental Science program at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, MA. I learned to manage student lab and field work and run sessions to complete problem sets and review course content. Each student completed an independent research project as their full-time activity for the final six weeks of the course. As the TA, I was the first line of assistance for each step in the scientific process as the 39 undergraduates completed their research projects.
Teaching Data Science
Data science is a powerful tool for asking broad scale ecological questions and gaining insight into big data sets and global patterns. I believe it is an essential tool for students in ecology, empowering them to understand results and statistics they read and to create and implement their own models and analyses with publicly available data sources. During my PhD, I have developed material for teaching undergraduate students about using R statistical software as part of a data expedition class. During the class, students were guided through step by step examples of using R to draw correlations on an example dataset. With the tools to get started, they explored data of their own and used R to generate plots for their completed lab reports.
In Summer 2019, I mentored a group of advanced undergraduates and masters students as part of the Duke Data+ program. Over the course of the summer, the team developed software to clean and visualize time series data, using tools from both R and Python. Throughout the 10-week program, these students became more advanced at specific programming tasks than I am - it was my task as their mentor to serve as a resource for how to self-teach data skills and how to know what tools would be needed to reach the desired outcome. The students produced a data pipeline that will be implemented on the streampulse database.
Guest Lecturing
In Spring Semester 2020, I was invited to guest lecture in the undergraduate environmental sciences course ENV 102. This is an introductory course of ~100 students. I was asked to speak about water ecosystems as they tie to urbanization and social justice issues at global and local scales. Throughout my lecture, students were able to test their understanding of concepts and interact in small groups through multiple think-pair-share activities.
K-12 teaching
During my first year at Duke, three of my fellow ecology students and I founded and ran the first year of GALS – Girls on outdoor Adventure for Leadership and Science. As part of this free hands-on science course, I designed and implemented the geology lesson plans. Leading field lessons I learned to adapt my teaching based on active feedback from students, all of whom came from different backgrounds and education levels. This work built on my previous experience working with middle and high school students as a mentor for an advanced mathematics summer camp, MathPath, and as a volunteer for several STEM outreach programs.
Pedagogy Training
Through the Certificate in College Teaching Program at Duke, I have completed coursework and participated in peer feedback to improve my teaching skills:
· Fundamentals of College Teaching: GS 750
· College Teaching and Course Design: GS 755
· College Teaching and Visual Communication: GS760
Courses I can teach
I am prepared and qualified to teach courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level in Introductory Ecology, Field Ecology, Biogeochemistry, Freshwater Ecology, Introductory Geology, and related subjects. An example syllabus I have designed for a field-based freshwater science course can be found here.
Career Goals: I plan to pursue a career as a research scholar and educator. My goals are to (1) advance research focused on basic scientific understanding of ecosystems with direct relevance to policy and practice, (2) build local place-based research and teaching that facilitates integration of diverse perspectives, and (3) develop a strong skill set as an educator and science communicator focused on generating broad engagement in science. Bass fellowship will provide me with a much richer teaching experience than is otherwise available as a PhD student. This will allow me to start a faculty position well prepared to design and implement my own courses.