Graduate Teaching Award Winner: Jess Latimer

My name is Jess Latimer (she/her), and I am passionate about teaching! As a first year master's student in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, I sought out teaching opportunities and found Dalhousie’s Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT). During this process, I met some incredible mentors and learned more about my own teaching than I had thought possible.

As a teaching assistant for 3rd year undergraduates in my department, I instructed practical molecular biology lab skills and supported students with theoretical concepts. Most of my work was done in a weekly, three-hour lab with a small teaching team of four teaching assistants and an instructor. I also gave a talk on poster presentation skills to prepare students for their summative assessment.

But I wanted more. I found it in the field of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the research and study of teaching practices to improve student learning. As part of my SoTL journey, I led grant development for two CLT grants—the Anne Marie Ryan Teaching and Learning Enhancement Grant, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Grant—to fund the Microbial Observatory Science Outreach Module (MOSOM) program with project lead Dr. Joe Bielawski (Biology & Mathematics and Statistics).

This program is a collaboration between the Institute of Comparative Genomics (ICG) and the Dalhousie Science Scholars and Leaders Program (DSSLP) to offer early undergraduate research experiences where students co-produce and share new knowledge on microbial biodiversity. Our student partners design and carry out their own study, analyze results, and communicate their findings to peers in an interactive workshop. The centerpiece of the MOSOM approach is the creation of science educational content by, with, and for youth from underrepresented communities.

Acting as a mentor in a student-led, inquiry-based project has been a new challenge I have found incredibly gratifying. The MOSOM program encourages deep learning with the flexibility and challenges that arise with exploratory science, rather than the carefully curated laboratory courses I have previously taught. Since students are actively designing an interdisciplinary project to analyze soil microbiomes, the type and amount of knowledge they need to succeed is as dynamic as those microbiomes.

One of my core teaching and mentoring goals is to assess, and constructively address, knowledge gaps to support students; however, I have realized how much I have relied on course structure and assessments to do so. I am now adapting my mentorship style to use more discussion and reflection to better check student understanding in this new-to-me style of teaching.

One of the aspects of the SoTL project I am looking forward to is “teaching how to teach.” While I have experience teaching in a classroom, I am still quite new to the field of SoTL. Although I now have a grasp of the foundational theories from taking the graduate seminar course in “University Teaching and Learning” (CNTL 5000) and participating in the Certificate in University Teaching and Learning (CUTL) program, this will be the first time I will be helping to train others to teach their own material. I believe skills such as learning how to learn and learning how to teach are universally important, but oftentimes tricky to put into words. In preparing to teach others these professional skills, I have gained a deeper insight into my own teaching philosophy and practices, as well as an ability to convey abstract ideas, which is essential for teaching, science communication, and beyond.

Throughout this process, the best thing I ever did was reach out to people in my field and learn about existing initiatives—that’s how I found out about MOSOM in the first place! The MOSOM program gave me a strong basis for my SoTL project and put me in touch with people who could help me. For instance, during grant writing I was able to learn many tips and tricks (like the effective use of headings, bold and italics in long grant proposals) from experienced faculty from the ICG and CLT to use in everyday writing and scholarship applications. From writing to facilitating lab meetings, if there is one thing I learned from working on this project it’s that becoming a better mentor requires finding yourself some great mentors.