spotlight Articles
An Interview With Carrie Hall
From boot camps to bugs to bioacoustics, Carrie Hall has a wide range of experience. Carrie works at the crossroads of environmental health and animal behavior, often drawing on her other work as a behavioral ecologist. Her research focuses on insect systems, covering a wide range of topics including bioacoustics, conservation, and the impact of environmental changes on behavior. Her lab, however, serves a dual purpose - she studies teaching and learning, largely because of her previous experiences.
Carrie didn’t pursue science right away. After high school, she joined the U.S. Air Force as a special operations medic. This experience would play a key role in shaping her future research in teaching and learning. “Everything I learned was on-the-job training. That's what the military does - you learn everything by doing it,” said Carrie. After eight years of active duty, she made the transition from air base to academia.
There, Carrie encountered a teaching style that felt foreign to her - long lectures that put focus on note-taking over participation. Previously, she had been in a line of work that employed active learning exclusively. “I almost left science because I thought there was something wrong with me. I didn’t realize that less than 10% of people can actually learn that way.” Despite the challenges, she persevered.
Eventually, Carrie participated in her first undergraduate research experience investigating cricket mating behavior. What could have been just another assignment became a revelation to her. She realized that science was more than a series of endless lectures - there was still room for learning by doing. This experience would kickstart her desire to answer a simple question: What teaching techniques could be implemented to help students learn better? Today, that goal fuels her work with EDU-STEM. Biology teaching reform has been the goal of many people for quite some time now, but Carrie believes that EDU-STEM’s collaborative network is a unique boon.
Carrie believes that changing teaching pedagogies is the first step, and having a group of invested scientists from around the country could do a lot to invoke institutional change. These professionals are already actively working in academia - that’s the key. “It’s like the ecology of an organism: as interactions within an organization change, how can that then inform the way we change our teaching?”
This line of thought translates to her third professional passion: Blending her fields of study. By looking at academia through the lens of ecology, Carrie is able to uncover new dimensions within her research. She is actively applying this frame of thinking to her current work, investigating the ways that bio- and ecoacoustics can be used to predict the types of active learning taking place within classrooms.
Her research won’t stop there; the amalgamation of ecology and education has given Carrie many ideas which she is excited to pursue in the future. This fresh and nuanced perspective opens the door to new ways of thinking, and it’s bound to help improve education as a whole.