Week 4

Teaching Assignments based on my Teaching Philosophy

Based on my teaching philosophy my assignments will endeavor to prepare students to successfully address the unique challenges associated with STEM careers.

Above all assignments should be pertinent to my students’ interests and goals. Within the assignments students will be able to select topics that are of interest and of value to them. This serves a twofold purpose – first, once out of school very few tasks are explicitly laid out, so students should learn to deal with ambiguity. Second, critical thinking will be strengthened because independent effort will be required for success in this type of course.  

I assume that students will come from a variety of scientific disciplines and therefore want students to be able to select materials that are related to their discipline of study and examine them with a critical eye focused on composition. When examining cutting edge science textbooks are inadequate because they are outdated the day that they are published, subsequently this course will rely heavily on journal and magazine articles. This is also beneficial to students as these are the materials that they will be relying on as professionals not textbooks.

This course will also incorporate technology as part of the assignments, knowing how to use technology to effectively disseminate information is almost as important as the knowledge itself.

Specific assignments will include:

1.    weekly blog postings on recent research from the primary literature or general audience sources.

2.    Verbal presentation on recent research from the primary literature or general audience sources.

3.    Comparing and contrasting primary literature with articles describing it in general audience news outlets.

4.    Drafting press releases.

5.    Examining various sides of a controversial topic.

6.    Writing a full length research or magazine article.

It is my hope that this variety of assignments will provides students practical and applicable experience, as well as writing samples that they can use for future training or job applications.

Week 3

STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Hilary Graham, MA

As an educator, my goal is to stimulate interest and prepare students to meet the demands of their future careers by fostering critical thinking and equipping them with the knowledge and the skills needed to successfully address the unique challenges associated with STEM careers.  To achieve this goal, I have developed a teaching philosophy that is summarized below. 

First, I believe that a relationship of mutual respect should be built between student and teacher, which will  promote mutual growth.  Some of the teachers who have made the greatest impact on my education as a scientist and, more generally as a person, are people who pushed me beyond what I believed were my intellectual limits. In my experience, being challenged is a part of growth and development. I would hold students to high standards, and I would adopt an open door policy to insure that any student who wanted to learn found the support necessary to master the topic at hand. 

Another of my core beliefs about teaching is that it is my responsibility to present material in a way that makes it pertinent to my students’ interests and goals.   While, I believe that mastery of the principles and ‘vocabulary’ are important, I know that students are far more likely to be motivated to lay this groundwork if the subject matter is presented in a manner that lends relevance to their futures. One way I intend to approach the challenge of relevancy is to center my lectures on topical issues. It is my belief that the most satisfying learning in science and science writing begins when a real-world problem piques the student’s curiosity, and their own interest drives them to press the bounds of their knowledge.

It is my hope is that I could implement teaching strategies that caused my students to think critically. Interaction with students in classroom and laboratory students has taught me  that one learns best from independent effort and from one’s mistakes.  However well-intentioned, trying to ‘do it for them’ or protect them from mistakes is counterproductive to learning and does not represent real-world experiences.  They must think independently.  I have heard and observed that students learn what we ask them to learn.  If we ask them to fill in the blank, they learn to fill in a fact.  If we ask them to solve a problem, they learn to solve a problem

My development as an educator is a work in progress.  I have identified several goals for the coming years, including identifying a teaching mentor with whom to discuss my ideas and challenges. Furthermore, I intend to develop a short and informal inventory for assessing the abilities of my students at the beginning of the semester.  I think this will be especially useful in introductory courses for gauging the level of preparation that high school education currently confers.  To determine my own strengths and weakness as an educator, I plan to employ an informal, mid-semester survey of my students’ opinions of the lecture format and materials. Finally, I would like to experiment with a 5-minute writing exercise at the conclusion of each week of lectures.  My idea is to have the students quickly describe the “What? So What? and Now What?” of the material of day.  These questions will allow me to assess whether the students comprehended the basic vocabulary of the lesson, how the vocabulary connects to a biological theme, and in what ways the theme is related to current biological problems.  It will also give the students regular practice in communicating scientific information.

I believe that my recent experiences at the cutting edge of cancer research and the time I have been able to devote to one-on-one mentoring of student researchers, will serve me well as an educator.

Week 2

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?"

I think the answer to this question is in the Ede and Lunsford article where they state:

“One of the factors that makes writing so difficult, as we know, is that we have no recipe: each rhetorical situation is unique and thus requires the writer, catalyzed and guide by a strong sense of purpose, to reanalyze and reinvent solutions.”

I would have to agree with this based on my professional experience. Every document I write has a different purpose, specifications and audience, therefore, there is no formula to be rotely followed making the writing process unique for each document. Learning generally starts with the regurgitation of knowledge and then moves into application and analysis according to Blooms Taxonomy. Writing doesn’t work like this - it is a craft that has to be practiced and has a learning curve that must be overcome before basic proficiency is achieved. Also there are vast differences in the skills and/or knowledge required for different genres of writing that maybe prerequisites to any writing skills.

It is also very difficult to teach writing because it is a very internal non-linear and personalized process unlike reading, speaking or listening that are more linear and can be external evaluated. I think one way to overcome these obstacles is to view drafts of documents. Almost everything one reads, who is not an editor, is in its finished state, which may not be how it was drafted.

Addressing the audience aspect of the Ede and Lunsford article, I almost completely disagree with the idea of invoked audience, where the writer imagines the audience. This may be due to my past training and current work in biomedical science which is very product driven and not at all process driven. Every document is specifically tailor to audience that is very real, makes real decisions that have real consequences. While I may not personally know the audience, I do generally know their background and level of knowledge to which I tailor the document.

Also in the Ede and Lunsford article is the analysis of Mitchell and Taylor where they highlight the role on the audience in the writing process. As a biomedical communicator I feel it’s my role to effectively communicate the data and the implications where good writing effectively communicates and bad writing ineffectively communicates. More and more audiences are becoming interactive participants in the writing process via the post pubiclation peer-review process that occurs on sites such as Faculty of 1000 and PLoS. I think one learns how to write well by practice and feedback from a mentor or their audience.

Early in the Ede and Lunsford they highlight how Mitchell and Taylor advocate for writing instruction within subject matter courses. While some aspects of ‘good’ writing are universal, many more aspect are genre and field specific. Student would likely benefit from learning how to effectively write in their discipline of choice.

Week 1: June 7th

Currently I am Coordinator of Department Publications in the Department of Molecular Carcinogenesis at the MD Anderson Cancer Center Science Park. While the main MD Anderson campus is in Houston, I work in Smithville, which is 45 minutes east of Austin where I live. I am responsible for assisting basic science researchers with writing grants, manuscripts, progress reports and memos. I am also responsible for all of the Department’s websites, as well as writing documents intended for the general public. As need aspects of my job include planning fundraisers and Departmental activities.

This is my first ‘real’ job - previously I was a scientist. I received my bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from UC Davis and my master’s degree in Molecular Biology from UT Austin. This is my second go at graduate school, but this time I think I have found my true calling. I love the discovery and communication involved in basic science research, but I hate the repetitiveness and failure…both of which are key components of research. In my current role I am involved in the processes before and after the work is completed – basically the idea phases and I love it.

My previous academic training was in biology and I communicate fairly well for someone who has no formal training. I am in this graduate program because I want to improve my knowledge base and skills in communication. My career goal is to continue to follow my interests, which I do not anticipate to be static over my career. I am very involved in the American Medical Writers Association from which I see the diversity of career options available. I would like to incorporate research into my career and therefore will likely stay in academia because I am curious by nature. Ideally I would like to have a faculty title within a science department where I could help investigator with their writing and conduct communications based research projects.

Generally composition is putting together pieces to form a whole. Specifically to this class I would like that it is effectively crafting written or verbal communication to express an idea.