Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

"And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."-Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

There are few moments in my high school classes I remember distinctly, save for the labs I did in Mrs. Barbara Neel's Biology classes.  The wonder I felt at utilizing the simple model of the ribosome she had constructed out of paper to demonstrate translation, the awe I felt when we were able to cut planaria and watch them regenerate, the fascination I felt at the dissections we were able to do; these memories seer into my mind as the reason why I am who I am today.  I have had some amazing teachers, from Dr. Werner Horsthemke who taught me Physical Chemistry and made me understand what calculus is for  to Dr. Foster who challenged us with amazing US literature, I am thankful and grateful to the teachers and professors and mentors who have guided my learning along the way.  

I was the Faculty Instructor for the ASU West STEM TRIO Student Support Services Program.  More information about that program can be found here.  I taught the first year seminar class for this program, and we focus on mapping a plan to achieve the skills they need in their future careers, work on a few of those skills, and we also spend some time on experimental design.  Here's a neat activity we did as an experimental design challenge.  We also use mealworms to design and test behavior experiments.  

I have so many positive feelings about my learning experiences and education.  I can only hope that I also can inspire and nuture students' learning as well. One aspect of this desire is my commitment to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).  This is a way of designing learning experiences that tries to assess their impact and then instructors share these with the broader community for dissemination and feedback.  I am extremely lucky to be a part of the American Society for Microbiology education community and the The Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education, as an associate editor of the Perspectives Section.  

I have published many of my own SoTL activities and share my favorite here because it combines the awesome power of yeast genetics with student driven learning: yeast mutagenesis

My SoTL work can all be found here.

We have also worked with Bean Beetles after receiving training with Lara Ferry from the Bean Beetle Curriculum Network. I was so grateful to have that opportunity to learn about these interesting invertebrates. Here's the curriculum module we developed.  The student poster won Best Poster in 2012 at Arizona Nevada Academy of Science Annual meeting.