Images by Ian McAllister, used with permission: https://pacificwild.org
Close your eyes.
Reach out with your mind’s hands and touch…
…Everything.
All the facts and feelings and places and faces, glittering and dancing, all held together; moored in place by thin lines of associations, cause-and-effect relationships, memories, experiences;
Do you have it?
A quivering tangled mass of everything you know…
Cradled in your hands…
Slippery and glowing…
Look!
Out in the distance!
A community of wolves along the westernmost coast of BC have learned that by only eating the heads of parasite-ridden salmon and leaving the bodies behind, they won’t get sick from the parasites.
They live on the rocky beach, fishing in the shallows, and over the centuries they have changed; Their leg bones are denser to keep them stable in the surf and their paws are broad like paddles, to help them swim between islands.
They are evolving into something new, something not unlike seals…
Reach out and catch it!
This glowing fact!
Where does it fit in your network of understanding?
Take these sea wolves and lash them down into your universe with questions, with maps, with the idea that innovation can literally breed adaptation,
With the image of a strangely streamlined wolf pup diving after the glitter of a fish through the icy brackish water of the Pacific… Look!
Your world has changed shape!
There’s a sea wolf in it now!
This is how I want to teach you.
I can point out each glimmer of knowledge, but I can’t catch them for you.
My job is to help you cast your own lines; tie your own nets.
Every knot is different and everyone ties knots differently; I can show you how I do it, but my hands…
…are not your hands.
My eyes are not your eyes.
So I’mma ask you to try,
…and fail and try again; I need you to be brave.
To experiment, to explore,
I need you to close your eyes, and see that glittering tangled mass of understanding. Look at all these knots you’ve already tied; you can do this!
You’ve been doing it your whole life.
We all have…
Look around you;
We have all been practicing.
Growing strong and streamlined,
Threading together our own minds with evermore clever fingers.
Our eyes are different and our hands are different and we see and touch and know…
Differently
But we all have this same task ahead of us, Reach out.
Let’s tie some knots,
…together.
Learn more about BC coastal wolves:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/10/coastal-sea-wolves-canada/
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/tracking-british-columbias-secretive-sea-wolf
Get involved in conservation efforts:
https://pacificwild.org/campaign/save-bc-wolves/
https://www.raincoast.org/projects/wolves/
Teaching Philosophy
Each person has a unique framework connecting everything they know into an integrative understanding of reality; this is one’s worldview. When new knowledge is integrated, it can be applied in unanticipated contexts. Learning is not just the absorption of facts into your brain, but the integration of those facts into your worldview. The deepest challenge of learning lies in understanding how to fit that new knowledge into the larger framework of what you already know. My job, as a teacher, is to help students develop this critical skill, thus giving them agency over their own learning process. I do this by leaning into the inherent diversity of the classroom and developing an environment of creativity and bravery.
Diverse learning styles necessitate diverse learning strategies
Because each classroom is filled with diverse worldviews, finding effective integration methods is (and should be) an interactive endeavor. When teaching a concept, I try to describe it in every way I can think of: forwards, backwards, real life examples, anthropomorphized stuffed animal examples. Is this principal observable in mundane contexts? How was this principle developed? Who is it named after, and what’s their story? Here are 4 YouTube videos that describe it differently and with cartoons! Then I ask the students to solve problems using these concepts, in pairs and then groups. This is the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” method. I am explicit about why I’m saying the same thing many different ways, and this creates an empathy between the students: we are all different, just like everyone else. In my experience, students latch on to the format they like best, and use the rest of the time I’m talking to process the implications of the new connection they have made. However, they do remember that there are other ways of communicating this principle that might have worked for other people. When they turn to solve a puzzle with their neighbor, they are more flexible in the ways they communicate their ideas.
Knowledge integration is best taught and assessed through creative application
My favorite way to assess successful integration is to challenge my students to use their new knowledge creatively. Creativity requires students to make connections between new and old knowledge, and creativity-based formative assessment can tell me how well rooted new knowledge is in a student’s broader sense of the world. In past genetics and biology courses, I have used an assignment I call “the vocab project.” In this project, students are told to use vocabulary words correctly, in contextualized sentences, without directly defining those words. The format and content are left deliberately open to allow for maximal imaginativeness, and edits in response to feedback have allowed me to watch individual students improve their understanding in nuanced and shockingly imaginative ways. In the future, I look forward to extrapolating this technique to short answer questions on exams and one-minute essays in lecture halls. Other uses of creativity to increase the need for integrative learning in formative and summative assessment include; asking students to apply technical principles of genetics and evolution to migrating minion populations, and running population genetics simulations based on student-generated answers to student-generated survey questions. These assignments push students to draw on underlying frameworks and form connections between old and new knowledge.
Ask questions, make mistakes, get messy!
An environment that nurtures creativity and diverse learning styles is an environment of open questioning and critique. In order to understand how information fits into the world around them, students must feel enthusiastically welcomed to ask questions, try new approaches and, perhaps most importantly, be openly wrong. I create this environment through modelling. I ask the questions I want my students to be asking. When they give me a wrong answer, I celebrate them and work with them until they understand the concept better (“That is a great answer! It’s a wrong answer, but thank you for sharing it! It’s valuablebecause you’re not the only person thinking this way. So, let’s walk through it together…”). When I don’t know the answer to a question, I encourage my students to use the internet and teach me what they learn. When I am proven wrong, I admit it openly and with gusto; I’m learning too; we are all students here. Being openly wrong takes bravery, and it is the very best way to learn. Empowering students to answer their own questions, make (and correct) their own mistakes, and challenge me when they think they know better, will produce braver and more flexible learners.
Personal openness facilitates empathetic learning and teaching
When I was an undergraduate student, I struggled to see a path for myself to become a professor and researcher. Part of this difficulty lay in the absence of teachers who looked like, thought like, or acted like me. I am visibly queer, with chronic pain, and I have several learning disorders that I work with and value. I was afraid that I would have to change or hide who I was in order to be successful. I now know that I can be whoever I need to be and still reach toward my goals, but I had to figure that out through trial and error. I would have been a healthier and more successful undergraduate student if one of my professors had been openly queer, or openly neuroatypical, or openly disabled.
As a teacher, I want to be a role model for the full diversity of the students I work with. With every decision I make in the classroom and beyond I aim to model that, through confidence and perseverance, anyone can learn what I am teaching and succeed in their chosen field without compromising on who they are. The more accessible I am to my students, the more successful I will be at portraying their goals as attainable. With this in mind, I am extremely open about my own life, experiences, and learning. In the context of teaching, this includes being open and honest about my gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as my mental and physical health challenges. When I talk about my own struggles and experiences, I send the message that I am a fallible human who has done things that you, dear student, are also capable of. I’m no one special; just another weirdo asking questions. If I can learn this, you can learn this.
I love interacting with the diversity of learning strategies and knowledge frameworks that my students use to integrate the fundamental principles that are so quintessential to my own worldview. I love learning with them and feeling my own understanding of the human condition stretch and warp with each connection I make. At the heart of my teaching is my own deep-seated craving to integrate as much understanding of the world as I can. To model integrative learning, I myself must constantly be integrating the learning structures of every student I work with. This is the most important part of teaching: to learn together and, by doing so, to build something new.
Abigail Feresten, Ph.D. 