Author: Katherine Lithgow

As Senior Instructional Developer, Integrative Learning, Katherine Lithgow facilitates ePortfolio and Integrative Learning initiatives, supporting instructors across campus with the design and implementation of activities that help students integrate learning in academic, workplace, community and social environments. Prior to joining the Centre for Teaching Excellence, Katherine taught Cytology at The Michener Institute for Applied Health Sciences. She received her BA from the University of Toronto, and a Master’s in Educational Technology from UBC. In what seems like another life, Katherine worked as a cytotechnologist graduating from TMI’s Cytology program.

Bridging the Skills Gap – Katherine Lithgow

Sydney Harbour Bridge https://www.flickr.com/photos/gramarye/132249724

There’s been a lot of discussion in media and higher education about the skills, or lack of skills, our students have when they graduate from our universities. Politicians, the public, and even some of our colleagues have questioned whether universities are the best vehicles to help post-secondary students bridge the gap between high school and the working world of the 21^st century.

Many of the arguments centre around what they call ‘the skills gap’ and claim that today’s graduates do not have the skills necessary to meet the needs for the 21^st century work environment. For example, CareerBuilder.ca released results from a national survey which found that only 1 in 5 employers (19 per cent) believe academic institutions are adequately preparing students for roles needed within their organizations.

Of course, there are others who have argued that there isn’t a ‘skills gap’ to bridge. In 2013, for example, leading economist, Don Drummond, reported that he couldn’t find “a shred of evidence that Canada has a serious mismatch between skills and jobs” contradicting what Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared as “an urgent national priority.”

Whether a skills gap exists or not, we do know two things:

Students and parents have their eye on post-graduate job prospects, regardless of the degree.
Employers report that they look for specific skills when hiring new graduates and these preferred skills are common across most, if not all, occupations.

A report by the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers (2013) identified communication, teamwork, analytical, strong work ethic, and problem solving as the top 5 preferred skills that employers seek when hiring new grads. These same five skills have been consistently identified in a number of similar surveys conducted across Canada and in the United States with slight variations in the order. Employers, then, appear to be looking for, what we call Professional Skills / Essential Employability Skills/Transferable Skills regardless of the degree designation.

Now, we might ask ourselves, “What does this have to do with me? It’s not my job to get students jobs”. And that’s true. And we also might say, “Well, I teach cutting edge research and best practices in my discipline.” And that is fine, too. And we might even say, “We don’t have time to ‘cover soft skills’ – it’s not our job to teach these.” Well, that’s not entirely true. Because, in 2005, the Ontario Council of Academic Vice-Presidents (OCAV) developed a set of Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations (UDLEs) for all universities in the province. The UDLEs are a set of guidelines that “elaborate the intellectual and creative development of students and the acquisition of relevant skills that have been widely, yet implicitly, understood. At their most basic, the six UDLEs articulated by OCAV are as follows:

Depth and breadth of knowledge
Knowledge of methodologies
Application of knowledge
Communication skills
Awareness of limits of knowledge
Autonomy and professional capacity

The University of Waterloo has added two more UDLEs:

Experiential learning
Diversity

Take a look at what the undergraduate degree level expectations are for UDLE 4 and UDLE 6.

Baccalaureate/Bachelor’s Degree

Baccalaureate/Bachelor’s Degree: Honours

UDLE 4. Communication Skills

… the ability to communicate accurately and reliably, orally and in writing to a range of audiences.

… the ability to communicate information, arguments, and analyses accurately and reliably, orally and in writing to a range of audiences.

UDLE 6.Autonomy and Professional Capacity

a) qualities and transferable skills necessary for further study, employment, community involvement and other activities requiring:· the exercise of personal responsibility and decision-making; · working effectively with others;b) the ability to identify and address their own learning needs in changing circumstances and to select an appropriate program of further study; andc) behaviour consistent with academic integrity and social responsibility.

a) qualities and transferable skills necessary for further study, employment, community involvement and other activities requiring:· the exercise of initiative, personal responsibility and accountability in both personal and group contexts;· working effectively with others; · decision-making in complex contexts;b) the ability to manage their own learning in changing circumstances, both within and outside the discipline and to select an appropriate program of further study; andc) behaviour consistent with academic integrity and social responsibility.

These expectations are the very skills that top the list of skills that employers are looking for, those Professional Skills / Essential Employability Skills/Transferable Skills, regardless of the degree designation.

I’d say we do a good job addressing UDLE 1, 2, 3, & perhaps 5 – those UDLEs that focus on dissemination of knowledge. Through tests, exams, essays, projects, and for some students, theses or capstones and presentations, we provide opportunities for students demonstrate gains they are making in these knowledge-related areas. We explicitly ask them to demonstrate these gains, and we give them grades for demonstrating achievement in these areas. Assigning grades lets students know that these things are valued and worth learning.

What we might not do as often, or as well, is let students know that the skills and attributes outlined under Autonomy and Professional Capacity (UDLE 6) and Communication (UDLE 4) are also valued.

Communication to wide audience (not just the instructor!)
Exercise of initiative
Personal responsibility and accountability to self and others
Decision-making
Effective teamwork
Problem-solving

These are the competencies and skills that we presuppose student have or are acquiring while they are working on what we will eventually mark. We expect students to value these things, but if we looked at what gets marked in courses, which in turn translates to what gets valued by the students, I think we’d agree that these transferable/professional skills often are not assigned marks, or if they are, they count for a small portion of the overall grade.

This doesn’t mean that students do not develop or acquire these skills. But, because we don’t explicitly draw students’ attention to the fact that they are developing these skills, they often remain invisible to our students. And yet, these invisible, often unacknowledged or undervalued skills are precisely the extra-degree skills that employers want to hear about.

To help bridge the skills gap, we need to expose these transferable skills to our students. Make them visible. Make them count.

So the question is how do we make these visible and valued to students? The first step is to make them explicit and visible to ourselves. Then we are better able to make them visible to our students.

Here are some tips that can be used to help bridge the skills gap. [If some of these sound familiar, you may have seen a presentation that Jill Tomasson Goodwin and I gave at the OND conference this past April, or you may have seen blog posts by James Skidmore, Shannon Dea and Mary Power.]

Make the transferable skills visible and explicit to yourself

Review the UDLEs – Review the bulleted list within each category, and determine if you could turn it into a learning outcome for your course or program. Pay particular attention to UDLE 4 & UDLE 6.
Review your existing course syllabus – Determine what UDLEs you are making visible to the students. What is it that you mark?
Review your existing course assignments – What communication skills, or elements listed under Professional Capacity and Autonomy are you expecting your students to use or develop in order to complete the assigned tasks, but are not making explicit to your students? What transferrable skills are students expected to use, but remain invisible and not counted?

Make these professional/transferable skills explicit and visible to your students. Make them count.

Talk to your students about the UDLEs –show them what the undergraduate degree level expectations actually are and what that means in terms of your discipline, program or course. Review relevant UDLEs with your students and show how they map to the relevant Essential Employability Skills/Transferable Skills or Professional Skills (whatever you are calling them) that employers are looking for. Some instructors have assigned the reading ‘It takes more than a major’ to help students see the relevance these skills have in the workplace.
Discuss the syllabus – take some time in class, or online, to explain what the learning outcomes for your course really mean and how these outcomes fit into the bigger picture. Explain the differences between the skill being taught or acquired in the course and knowledge being imparted. Explicitly state which UDLEs your course activities are addressing, and how particular course activities will help students develop them. Throughout the course, as you review activities and assignments with your students, ask students to identify which skills they believe they will need or will be developing as they complete the course activities.
Add a question to an assignment or on an exam- provide students with the opportunity to reflect on what they are learning in the course, and how that connects to the bigger picture. This can be done by asking student to add an extra paragraph to an assignment where they explain how a particular assignment helped them meet a particular UDLE, or how might they transfer or apply what they’ve learned to another course or another context. Helping students see the relevance also helps them recognize that spending time learning how to articulate how they might use a skill beyond the course is important and not just ‘busy work’. If your students are working on team projects, have each student articulate how the experience has helped them develop communication skills (UDLE 4) or skills outlined under Autonomy and Professional Capacity (UDLE 6).
Provide opportunities for students to perform ‘authentic skills and tasks associated with their field’ and explicitly state why this skill is valued outside the classroom. In a philosophy class, students peer review each other’s articles because it is the kind of activity that philosophers do.
Provide opportunities for students to connect transferable skills to co-op/work and co-curricular experiences. See how Jill Tomasson Goodwin used ePortfolios in her DAC 309 course to help students make this connection

Discuss with your colleagues or at department meetings how to intentionally integrate into the curriculum opportunities to help students develop and reflect upon how they might apply these professional/transferrable skills to new contexts.
Utilize Existing Resources

Contact Katherine Lithgow – Senior Instructional Developer, Integrative Learning Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE)
Review the Centre for Teaching Excellence “Teaching Tips”
Talk to Faculty Teaching Fellows
Engage your colleagues in discussion

Share your ideas and strategies – How are you or a colleague bridging the gap and re making these skills valued and visible to your students? If you’re teaching a large class, and have examples to share, I’m especially interested!

Providing Authentic Learning Experiences – Katherine Lithgow

This past May, I had the great pleasure of presenting at Laurier’s Integrated and E ngaged Learning Conference with Jill Tomasson Goodwin (Associate Professor -Faculty of Arts teaching in the Digital Arts Communication (DAC) specialization program; Scott O’Neill (Associate Director, Marketing and Communications within the Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment (MUR)department and Madhulika Saxena (a student in the W2014 DAC 300 course and a recent graduate from uWaterloo’s Arts & Business program).

We wanted to explore how we might bring high quality high impact practices (HQ HIPs) into the classroom. Our presentation focused on DAC 300’s collaborative project that provided students with an authentic experiential learning opportunity where the students worked in teams to address an on-campus community partner’s real world need. Our goal was to highlight how a course might embody the characteristics of HQ HIPs and what can be done in terms of course design and course delivery to make a course a high quality high impact practice. Using DAC 300 as an example, throughout the presentation, we provided ‘tips’ which we hope will help others incorporate high quality high impact learning opportunities into their classrooms.

Experiential education has always been important in education, and it is of particular importance at uWaterloo. We say it is in our DNA. We’re known for our co-op program; experiential learning is one of our Undergraduate Degree Level Expectations and our strategic plan promises ‘Experiential Education for All’. We know that when done well, that is, where learning is “as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract,” and emphasizes both judgment and exploration, experiential education helps students better absorb, retain and transfer knowledge (Lombardi, 2007).

So… what are the characteristics of a high quality high impact practice?

Performance expectations set at appropriately high levels
Significant investment of time and effort by students over an extended period of time
Interactions with faculty and peers about substantive matters
Experiences with diversity
Frequent,timely and constructive feedback
Periodic, structured opportunities to reflect and integrate learning
Opportunities to discover relevance of learning through real-world applications
Public demonstration of competence

(Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S., 2013)

You can view our presentation here to see how these characteristics came to life in DAC 300.

A lot of things came together to make the DAC 300 course a great learning experience. A couple that I want to highlight centre around 1) collaboration and 2) the impact on the instructor and students.

Experiential learning opportunities often bring students into meaningful contact with future employers, customers, clients, and colleagues. What struck me about the DAC 300 project was the extent to which Jill collaborated with an on-campus ‘community partner’ (Scott O’Neill and the MUR department) to provide her students with this real-world, relevant learning opportunity. In turn, Jill’s students collaborated together to provide MUR with a solution to address their real-world need. If we want to make more of these high impact practices available to our students, we will likely have to collaborate with campus partners -campus partners from writing centres, student affairs, living learning communities, residence life and librarians are just a few examples of who these campus partners might be. More important, the collaboration has to benefit all parties.

The role of the instructor often changes when you provide authentic learning experiences to your students. Prepare to learn along with your students. Incorporating authentic learning experiences into your course can be disorienting and uncomfortable for you AND your students. Your role shifts from ‘instructor’ to ‘coach’. Students will come up with solutions or approaches that you have never thought of. That can be a good thing, but it also means relinquishing a certain amount of control, being flexible, and adapting to circumstances- just as we do in the real world.

Jill Tomasson Goodwin has kindly created and shared these 6-Tips-and-10-Tricks-to-Facilitate-Classroom-based-Experiential-Learning. Jill encourages you to adapt them to your needs and invites you to email her (jtomasso@uwaterloo.ca) to chat with her further about how these choices worked in practice.

DAC 300 is a 12-week reflexive theoretically-informed, practice-based course in User Experience Design (the art of understanding, designing, and creating an ‘end-to-end’ experience of technology for users). The course design choices are based on a very real-world application of knowledge — facilitated inside, and tested outside, the classroom, for an actual client, with a pressing need.

During the W2014 offering, Professor Jill Tomasson Goodwin and her third-year Digital Arts Communication class consulted with UWaterloo’s MUR department to design an augmented reality version of a tour brochure. To complete the project, teams of undergraduate students drew upon their knowledge of user experience design, interviewed high school students, and then iteratively prototyped a range of augmented reality experiences, all designed to engage and inform students as they visit and explore the campus. The project and technology have been so successful that UW will use augmented reality to enhance other recruitment publications.

Resources

Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are. Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Kuh, G. D. (2008). Excerpt from “High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter”. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm

Kuh, G. D., O’Donnell, K., & Reed, S. (2013). Ensuring quality and taking high-impact practices to scale . Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Lombardi, M. M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause learning initiative,1(2007), 1-12. http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/authentic-learning-21st-century-overview

Integrative and Applied Learning Value Rubric (AAC&U) http://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/integrativelearning.cfm

The Challenge: Experiential Education for All – Katherine Lithgow

“Experiential education for all” is one of the goals set out in our strategic plan and stems from our recognition “that learning is stronger when knowledge is tried and tested”. It is the ‘for all’ part that sounds a bit overwhelming, doesn’t it? I mean, how can we provide this opportunity in a meaningful way for all of our students? Continue reading The Challenge: Experiential Education for All – Katherine Lithgow

This is Real Life – Katherine Lithgow

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them” –Aristotle

We know that students learn best when learning is personally meaningful and when they are able to use knowledge and concepts to solve real-world, complex problems. They retain that knowledge longer when they learn-by-doing. Authentic learning experiences have the following ten design elements (Lombardi, 2007)

Real-world relevance
Ill-defined problem
Sustained investigation
Multiple sources and perspectives
Collaboration
Reflection (metacognition)
Interdisciplinary perspective
Integrated assessment
Polished products
Multiple interpretations and outcomes

Authentic learning experiences are effective because they help learners make connections between new concepts and existing knowledge structures. When learners can see how new knowledge is personally meaningful, they are better able to retain and assimilate that knowledge into their existing knowledge structures. Working with the concepts regularly and repeatedly in different contexts with others helps with retention and understanding. Including a cycle of reflection on action gives students the time and space they need to consider why they acted as they did, consider the group dynamics and begin to develop the habit of questioning their actions and ideas to help inform future action. Finally, authentic learning experiences help students connect the concepts to the ‘big picture’ which includes the richness of the social setting- the people, the environment, and the activity. This helps the learner explore the concepts in different contexts.

Qualtars (2010) contends that “experiential education needs to be viewed as a unique form of pedagogy involving deep reflection, collaboration and assessment” (p.95). There are a number of courses on campus that offer authentic learning experiences; some of these have been presented at the Integrative and Experiential Learning Series. Examples include the following. Students in Knowledge Integration complete an undergraduate senior research project and present their findings at a poster session- (See the abstracts for the 2013 class projects). Mary Louise McAllister (Environment) offers an integrative, blended course which combines lectures with field trips, peer teaching and tutorial–based project work. The students present their qualitative research findings in a multi-media journal format. Troy Glover (Rec & Leisure Studies) offers a course on program management where students work with a community partner to offer a program. During the course, the students work in small groups with the community partner to conduct a needs assessment and design, implement and evaluate a program. The course is designed so that the students have a number of opportunities to reflect on the experience. In addition, the students participate in a weekend retreat which serves as a team building exercise as well as providing them with a program to critique and use to inform their own program planning. Students in Kelly Anthony’s (SPHHS) course can opt to work on a project with a community partner rather than complete traditional forms of assessment. These students enrich the class readings and discussions by sharing their experiences with their classmates throughout the term.

Initially, students may experience frustration as they deal with the ill-defined problems but they are motivated to carry on because the activity connects the course to the ‘big picture’. Participating in an authentic learning experience helps students relate to the concepts and processes on a personal level and better appreciate nuances that cannot be adequately captured by reading or listening to a lecture. They begin to immerse themselves in the practices of the discipline- both the social structures and the culture of the discipline; they begin to envision themselves as members of the discipline’s community.

There are challenges associated with implementing authentic learning experiences. Risk-taking for both the learner and the instructor is involved; as with any real-life ill-defined problem, neither the student nor the instructor can accurately predict how the experience will unfold. Authentic learning is a collaborative effort. Taking the time to develop teams…well it takes time, effort and requires support. But, the advantage of placing such an experience in an early course is that students can use these skills in later courses as well as outside the academic environment. And it helps students get to know people in their class and program.

Qualtars ( 2010) raises a point worth considering- “unless experiences outside the classroom are brought into the classroom and integrated with the goals and objectives of the discipline theory, students will continue to have amazing outside experiences but will not readily connect them to their in-class learning….Without a careful curriculum involving structured, reflective skill building, students may never learn what we hope they will outside the four walls of the classroom” (p. 95-96). This raises a number of questions and challenges – How can we ensure that students have the opportunity to experience authentic learning at least once during their time at university? What kind of support structures have to be in place to support authentic learning experiences?
How can these courses be identified so students can take advantage of the opportunity? [Some university websites provide a list of courses that offer experiential learning components. These can be further categorized according to faculty or department. See for example:
o Elon University , Kent State, DePaul University Catalogue
o Simon Fraser University – a place where students can find the curricular and co-curricular EE opportunities

If we agree that authentic learning is beneficial to students, is it worth leaving to chance?

Resources:

Qualtars, D.M. (2010). Making the most of learning outside the classroom. In D.M. Qualtars, (Ed), Experiential Education: Making the Most of Learning Outside the Classroom. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 124, (pp. 95-99). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. ISBN: 978-0-470-94505-6.

Introducing ePortfolios – Six Things to Help You Get Started- Katherine Lithgow

graphic by Carey, Penny Light and Kirker — ePortfolios and Integration

Our new learning management system, LEARN, includes an integrated ePortfolio. EPortfolios can be used to help students make connections to learning experiences regardless of where those experiences occur. They can help students document their learning, see how they are developing over time, and make plans for future growth. EPortfolios provide a space for students to reflect upon what they have learned in the classroom, in the workplace or in community and social environments, and provide evidence of how they have been able to apply skills and knowledge learned in one setting to another setting.

Since we’ve adopted LEARN this past year, there has been a significant increase in the number of instructors (and students) interested in using ePortfolios. Once instructors have decided they would like to use ePortfolios, the next question is often “So how do I go about incorporating the use of ePortfolios into my course or program? What do I do next?”

Here are six things you can do which will go a long way to help ensure the best learning experience for both instructors and students using ePortfolios in a course or program. (Based upon presentation by Lithgow, K. and Penny Light, T. (2012). Six Degrees (or so) of Integration: What Students Have to Say about ePortfolios. Presented at the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) Conference – “ePortfolios as a Catalyst for Connections: Celebrating the Curious, Creative and Capable Learner.”, Boston, MA.)*

Introduce ePortfolios and Expectations Early
Give ‘em Grades
Provide Feedback (Early and Often)
Respect disciplinary context
Encourage meaning making
Acknowledge that ePortfolios are a different way of providing evidence of learning

Unpacking the Process

Introduce ePortfolios and Expectations Early– Let your students know as early as possible in the course that they will be using ePortfolios. Outline what they will be expected to do and how the ePortfolios activities will help them achieve goals and outcomes for the course or the program. This can be done in a number of ways. Show an example or examples of previous students’ work (with permission, of course!). Show them an example of an ePortfolio presentation that you’ve created which models your expectations. Provide a rubric or statement of expectations.
Give ‘em Grades – Although we would like our students to be intrinsically motivated, the reality is the majority of our students are motivated by marks. The ePortfolio activities should be an integral part of your course or program, not an add-on. The mark assigned should reflect that this is a worthwhile activity. ePortfolio activities which are most successful in terms of student buy-in and student learning are those where the time and effort expected of the students is reflected in the weighting of the activity in the final course mark. The least successful and the least valued ePortfolio activities are those that are voluntary or are assigned minimal or bonus marks.
Provide Feedback (Early and Often): Incorporating reflective activities into the ePortfolio is an integral part of creating an ePortfolio presentation. Reflection is a learned activity; receiving constructive feedback from classmates, instructors, TA’s and mentors helps the student develop the capacity to reflect critically. You can create opportunities for students to get feedback by having them submit their work in progress midway through the term. Divide the students into small groups and have them peer-review each other’s work-in- progress using a rubric or guideline of expectations which you’ve provided. This gives students the opportunity to see other examples and exposes them to different perspectives. When students provide constructive feedback to others, they can consider ways to improve their own work prior to the final submission.
Respect disciplinary context- Students will see value in the ePortfolio activity when they can see how it will help them develop within the discipline. The activity has to allow them to use the language, skills and knowledge of the discipline. They have to understand how the activity will help them achieve program goals and outcomes.
Encourage meaning making (making connections-reflection) – Give your students permission to make connections to other courses, other disciplines, to their work experience, volunteer experiences, and social and community environments. Ask the students to explain what they’ve learned and how that learning is personally meaningful to them. Create a learning environment which provides them with a ‘safe place’ to share this with classmates, mentors and instructors. Encourage them to examine what they’ve learned in their academic and non-academic environments and how that impacts their learning as a whole. Ask them to reflect on past experiences- what have they learned? How will this affect future actions?
Acknowledge ePortfolios as a threshold – Asking students to explain what they’ve learned, provide evidence to support what they’ve learned, and demonstrate how they have achieved learning outcomes and goals you’ve set is not something students are accustomed to doing. Incorporating multimedia to demonstrate this is very different than asking students to write an essay or answer a multiple choice test. Students are accustomed to getting things ‘right’, rather than being rewarded for focusing on the process of learning- part of which ncludes making mistakes. Providing early and often feedback helps them reassure them that they are on the right track or gives them the opportunity to get back on track. Providing examples of ePortfolios from previous students (with permission!), or showing how you, the instructor, have completed a particular section of the ePortfolio, provides guidance and structure that students will need when hey are first introduced to ePortfolios. Provide a template or some sort of structure in the early years- decrease this over time. Take some time in class to review the ePortfolio functionality to address technology related concerns.

Trent Batson has proposed the following definition – “ePortfolio technology enables learners to manage the complexity and variability of learning designs and opportunities in formal and informal settings in order to gather evidence of their resultant deep learning.” T. Batson. (2012, Sept.18). Definition of “ePortfolio”. [Web log comment]. Retrieved from http://www.aaeebl.org/tbb?bmi=1075857

Interested in learning more? Don’t hesitate to contact me klithgow@uwaterloo.ca

*Influences on our work include:

Cambridge, D., B. Cambridge and K. Yancey (eds.), Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact, Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2009.

Cambridge, Darren, Eportfolios for Lifelong Learning and Assessment, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.

Chen, H.L, and T. Penny Light, Electronic Portfolios and Student Success: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning, Washington: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2010

Huber, M., and P. Hutchings, Integrative Learning: Mapping the Terrain, Washington D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2004.

Rodgers, Carol, “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking,” Teachers College Record, 104, 4 (June, 2002): 842-866.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Reflection in the Writing Classroom, Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1998.

The Art of Science – No Marks Attached — Lauren S. Singroy

Bacteriophage meets iPod Dance- by Lauren Singroy

As instructors, we often gripe about students not completing our assignments despite the marks attached to them. We’re even more upset when we have spent so much time creating the assignment, one which we know would really help students learn if they would only do it.

An amazing class that exceeded my expectations in many regards especially in terms of the professor’s passion for the subject material, and his desire to help students think about this material beyond the four walls of a lecture hall: these are my sentiments after having taken Fundamentals of Microbiology (BIOL 140) with Dr. Josh NeufeldI entered BIOL 140 with two goals in mind: to fulfill a degree requirement and not to fail the biggest exam (with it being potentially worth 70% of my final grade) I would ever write at university. I came out of BIOL 140 having accomplished so much more than the latter two things: I gained a basic understanding of and interest in microbiology as a discipline, and discovered a new way of studying and thinking about the world around me.

One of Dr. Neufeld’s unique teaching methods was partially responsible for these pleasantly surprising outcomes. Early on in the semester, Dr. Neufeld announced the initiation of an art gallery, to which he encouraged all BIOL 140 students to submit artwork (e.g. drawings and paintings) having some relevance to the course. At the end of the semester, the BIOL 140 students would vote for their favourite gallery submission, and the winning artist would receive a prize. In preparing a submission for the gallery, I was forced to think about how I could create a piece of art that was relevant to microbiology, demonstrated my uniqueness as an artist, and would be capable of winning over my classmates – after all, they were the ones ultimately deciding which gallery submission would be named the class favourite. After some thought, I came up with an idea for a painting that I thought just might satisfy the aforementioned criteria. By combining two concepts that I hoped my classmates would be familiar with (bacteriophage and the “iPod dance”), I created an art-piece that was amusing to both my classmates and my professor.

The microbiology art gallery was not only effective in helping me engage with course material during the term, but also inspired me to be creative in studying for my final exam. I documented this creative process in the form of a stop-motion video to show fellow students that there is so much more to studying than memorizing course material in the days leading up to an exam. Similarly, there is so much more to teaching than having a professor stand at a podium and deliver one discourse after the next. I appreciate Dr. Neufeld giving the BIOL 140 students a chance to be creative in a class in which people wouldn’t –or at least, I know I didn’t – expect such an opportunity to arise, and I encourage other professors to do the same (or be willing to try an unconventional teaching method from time to time).
H. BSc. Candidate in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. You can see Lauren’s artwork in the Daily Bulletin.