Anne Tierney

Novice Teachers Views of an Introductory Workshop about Teaching in the Biosciences.

Abstract Seven regional networking events, aimed at supporting and developing ‘early stage’ novice university bioscience teachers were held across the UK. These workshops allowed 230 participants to reflect on teaching styles, learn about Higher Education Academy resources and discuss strategies to deal with a range of teaching situations. Post-event feedback was sought, and the results are presented in this paper. Feedback on the events was overwhelmingly positive, highlighting the need for such events to support the development of new teachers in higher education. Institutional training varies and these opportunities for sharing experiences, asking questions, networking and reflection on teaching practice were highly regarded. Most participants felt more confident about their teaching and believed that students were more directly engaged in their teaching after attending the events. Recommendations for support of this category of teacher include provision of discipline-specific events, opportunity for local area networking and support for the development of reflective practice in teaching and learning.

Undergraduate interns as staff developers: flowers in the desert

Undergraduate education can be characterised by large lecture classes, lack of quality contact time with staff, and an impersonal experience. There is a move towards encouraging students to learn by enquiry, but how can this be encouraged, given pressures of time on both staff and students? One possible solution is to give the students themselves the opportunity to develop enquiry-based materials for courses that they are taking. In 2007, seven undergraduate interns at the University of Glasgow were given this opportunity. Taken from a variety of backgrounds, in terms of subject area and level of study, the interns spent four weeks investigating enquiry-based learning supported by a Teaching and Learning Centre facilitator, before moving on to work with a subject-based staff mentor for the following academic year, of which I was one. Each of the interns worked on a course that they also attended as a student, and developed, with the staff mentor, at least one enquiry-based intervention. In addition to the educational development, the interns were also invited to take part in several conferences, and present their work in their own right. We consider the effect that working as a staff developer had on the students, as they negotiated their identity within the wider community of staff developers, and the advantages and barriers to using this model with undergraduate students.

How bioscientists engage with the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

One of the issues that you highlighted in your presentation was that while many (the majority?) of the articles and papers submitted to Bioscience Education (http://www.bioscience.heacademy. ac.uk/journal/) could be described as Action Research, but were not explicitly identified as such. This got me thinking about bioscientists engaging in educational research into student learning, and the complexity of negotiating an unfamiliar research paradigm. As scientists, we are familiar with the accurate description of our experimental conditions, equipment, protocols and methods. However, with SoTL, we may be unfamiliar with the Social Sciences convention that there is a need to state the mode of research (for example, Action Research, or Critical Theory) and our stance (interpretivist, constructivist, positivist). As scientists, it could be argued that there is only the positivist stance, one reality that is confirmed or refuted by scientific experimentation. Having one stance removes the need to articulate it. However, if we add people (students and academic staff) into the mix, to what extent do we have to modify our positivism to take into account the experiences of the stakeholders, and perhaps take our own experiences and interpretations of reality into account? On a practical note, would it be helpful for articles in a journal such as Bioscience Education to identify as being Action Research, or one of the other methodologies? I believe that it would help, as phrases such as “Action Research” are banded about but I am not sure if we really understand the need to include that identification in the written account of what we have done. However, I have to admit that my experience in this is not extensive. I readily admit that until recently, I would not have explicitly stated the methods used, probably because I was not sufficiently comfortable with them, or realised the need to do so. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that it takes about ten years to develop a scholarly engagement with SoTL (Hubball et al., 2010), and conversations with Gary Poole and a presentation by Niamh Kelly (Kelly et al., 2011) at ISSOTL confirmed this longitudinal process.

An Extended, Problem-Based Learning Laboratory Exercise on the Diagnosis of Infectious Diseases Suitable for Large Level 1 Undergraduate Biology Classes

The development and evaluation of a two-week laboratory class, based on the diagnosis of human infectious diseases, is described. It can be easily scaled up or down, to suit class sizes from 50 to 600 and completed in a shorter time scale, and to different audiences as desired. Students employ a range of techniques to solve a real-life and relevant problem, and are introduced to the range and type of infectious agents, their routes of transmission and risk factors, clinical symptoms and diagnoses, and their treatment and prevention. No infectious material is used, and the practical is very inexpensive and easy to prepare. Six ‘patients’ are diagnosed, using their symptoms, patient histories, temperature records, serology, blood and faecal slide examination, and bacteriological isolation from blood, faeces and cerebrospinal fluid.

Communities of practice in Life Sciences and the need for brokering.

Etienne Wenger’s work on communities of practice is influential in teaching and learning in higher education. A core work of many postgraduate certificate in teaching and learning (PGCert) courses for new lecturers, it is studied, in the main, as a means to understand how to support and encourage students to achieve more effective learning. Communities of practice can also be applied to academics. In the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessors, the gulf between research-focused and teaching-Focused academics in life sciences has widened, so that in many institutions, these two groups have evolved into two distinct communities of practice; one whose priority is disciplinary research, the other’s learning and teaching. However, in 2015, the UK government announced that a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) would be introduced into higher education in England, as early as 2017. While the exact details of TEF remain unclear, it is certain that “excellence” and “student satisfaction” will be high on the agenda. It is vital, therefore, that the two communities of practice, research-focused and teaching-focused, find ways to come together in order to ensure high quality teaching and learning. Wenger proposes that this can be done through the process of “brokering”, which allows expertise from both communities of practice to cross from one to the other, strengthening both. This should be encouraged at departmental and institutional level, but another vital origin of brokering can be forged at a(n) (inter)national level at meetings such as the SEB Annual Conference, where teaching-focused academics have the opportunity to mix with research-active colleagues. While this paper is informed by recent and current events in the UK Higher Education sector, it is of interest to academics who work in an environment where research and teaching have become separate to any extent.