Links to teaching material (webpages)
Field Ecology Quarter: http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bio162/
Experimental Design and Analysis: http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bio286/
Kelp Forest Ecology: http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bio161/
I regularly teach or co-teach six courses at UCSC (along with a series of undergraduate and graduate seminars): Marine Ecology and Marine Ecology lab with Mark Carr (both 5 unit courses), Kelp Forest Ecology and Kelp Forest Ecology Lab with Mark Carr (both 5 unit course), the capstone immersion course, Field Ecology Quarter a 19 unit field course I co-teach with Giacomo Bernardi and a graduate statistics course (7 unit course with a lab) that is taken by graduate students in at least 7 departments (EEB, MCDB, Ocean Sciences, Environmental Toxicology, ENVS, Anthropology, EPS). I am extremely proud of all of these courses, but in particular – Field Ecology Quarter. This course provides an amazing educational and research opportunity for undergraduates that is very much in line with the mission of UCSC – to provide excellence in teaching and research. Students in this course can take no other course, they have 5 weeks of intensive lecturing on campus then we go to a remote field site. There they conduct their own research project with daily direct interactions with the faculty and TA’s. In the end each produces a scientific paper that we bind and make into a book. The evidence of the success of this program is that for every student we accept (25 total) we turn away 4. Also, virtually every student that has taken this course that has wanted to pursue a career in marine sciences either got a job in the field or went to graduate school.
My main goal as a teacher has been and will be to demonstrate the methodology of correctly done scientific research from development of hypotheses through the analysis of data. As such, I think it is critical to teach three things - 1) the way to formulate testable hypotheses, 2) the way to design surveys and experiments that adequately test hypotheses and, 3) the way to understand the results of investigations (the importance of related investigations). In my experience, this approach is the most efficient way to communicate the wonder of science, irrespective of the specific field.
For lecture courses I usually rely on critical examination of relevant literature and especially theory as a means of teaching science and methodology. Field courses offer more flexibility - here I combine background lecture material (so individuals can understand the science in addition to the nature) with demonstrations in the field and ultimately with student designed and implemented experiments in the field. These demonstrations range from simple descriptions of the life histories of selected organisms to designing and setting up surveys and experiments designed to test specific questions. In my discipline, ecology and evolutionary biology, there is no way to convey theory, hypothesis formation and testing and analysis of collected data without getting the student into the field with his or her own experiments – owning the design and learning equally from successes and mistakes.
Too often the analytical portions of scientific inquiry are downplayed in “field sciences”. I think this cripples students and also underestimates their abilities. A fundamental element of all Raimondi Teaching and Teaching Philosophy 2 science and, in my opinion, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in particular, is mathematics, which should be the basis for experimental design, formulation of theory and models and analytical approaches to data analysis. As such I incorporate relevant mathematics into all of my courses, culminating in my experimental design and statistics course.
Two examples will serve to convey the approach to teaching that I have found to be the most effective in my field. One comes from a graduate student in Environmental Toxicology, Alison L., who embraced analytical rigor and novelty when exposed to it. I first met Alison in a course that I used to teach as part of the UC Toxics program, which was conducted at Bodega Bay. She was working on the relationship between water quality and tissue chemistry in San Francisco Bay and had never really considered the implication of experimental design and data analysis that results from moving from controlled lab work to field. Her exposure to basic design in the UC Toxics program led her to take my statistics course here at UCSC. She came into the class without any previous exposure to stats but with a new desire for statistical rigor. The course is challenging to those that come in with experience, and very difficult for those without such experience. Her confrontation with the difficulty and power of multivariate statistics through hands on applications caused her to think about her data in very different ways. Alison became determined to learn these multivariate approaches and apply them to her data. This was hard for her in two ways. First learning the approaches and second the complex multivariate approach was very much counter the literature and culture in her field. Her work ended up being published in the best journals in her discipline and she just accepted a faculty position at the University of San Francisco, where part of her teaching will be in experimental design and statistics.
The second example comes from one of my undergraduates, Andrew A. Andrew is very characteristic of many undergraduates in our department who do not intellectual engage in traditional classes and who through exposure to our departments emphasis on experiential learning blossom academically. Andrew was a student in my Marine Ecology (lecture) course. His performance was pretty ordinary in the initial portion of the course, which is largely traditional. In the latter part of the course, where students design their own studies, Andrew started engaging. We challenged him to be creative and take intellectual risks in his design and he responded with an exceptional project. Following this course he took Kelp Forest Ecology which is largely a field based course that is centered on subtidal student designed and led projects (Professors largely act as technicians for the students in the project phase of the course). In this course Andrew was spectacular. The combination of directing his own work (with our oversight) and the complete responsibility for the outcome was what he needed to catch academic fire. Also, I think that combining intellectual creativity with flat out physical effort (underwater projects are very physically demanding) was exactly what Andrew and many of our students relish. After graduation Andrew was accepted in the Ph.D. program at Brown University, one of the finest Ecology and Evolutionary Biology graduate programs in the country.