Top teachers honoured: Anatomy course earns high marks in team teaching
Written By: Richard Cairney
2007-06-08
The University of Alberta recently honoured some of its most talented teachers - those who go the extra step in helping students advance through their academic careers.A total of 11 full-time professors and sessional instructors were recognized for individual and team-teaching achievements at the Timms Centre May 28.
This year's team teaching award is being presented to a trio of professors who provide undergraduate students with a solid foundation in anatomy by going beyond rote memorization and into a thorough understanding of how the human body works.
"The old view of anatomy is that what you do is try to memorize long lists of anatomical terms," said course director Dr. Pierre Lemelin. "What we do is provide an advanced undergraduate course with a very limited number of seats - we don't allow more than 20 students to take the class each year - and we offer them an anatomy course with different perspectives. We use a developmental, clinical, functional and evolutionary approach to understand more about the human body - how it is shaped, formed and how it works."
The Anatomy 403 course, taught by Lemelin along with Drs. Daniel Livy and Anna Farias, is a rare offering.
"For undergraduates to be able to perform their own dissection work is almost unheard of. I don't think there is a similar course in any Canadian institution at the undergraduate level - I would think we are among the very few that do offer this," said Lemelin.
The course is not as in-depth as medical-school courses, but does go a step beyond many of those classes. "In some medical schools now, in too many of them, they don't even perform dissection anymore. They rely too much on computers."
One comment from a Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry colleague in the trio's nomination package stated: "This course sets the standard by which other courses in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry are measured."
Students who take the course end up in careers as diverse as physical anthropology, neuroscience and bioengineering, as well as medicine.
"When we started the course in 2003, it was quite clear we had to do a really good job because the material itself is so dense," Lemelin said. "It is not a course you can do half-way. The team itself has one agenda: to teach the best that we can. And so far, the response has been over our wildest dream in terms of student appreciation."
The awards are presented by the University Teaching Award Committee.
The Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, awarded for teaching excellence by full-time continuing academic staff, is being presented to: David Barnet, Department of Drama; Robert Driver, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Clive Nigel Hickson, Department of Elementary Education; Paul Lu, Department of Computing Science and Jeremy Sit, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Lu is best known for teaching undergraduates an operating systems course which is closely related to his own research interest.
"It is the classic case of research and teaching feeding off each other," said Lu, who also revised a second-year course on programming methodology in C programming.
Lu says that, as a teacher, he tries to put himself in the shoes of his students - and it helps that he also earned his undergraduate degree at the U of A.
"I know how these courses fit together, so I can tell students that what they need to learn in one course, they will need to know for another course they're taking later on," said Lu.
Programming is often about building upon pre-existing work, Lu says, so his programming assignments build on one another, rather than requiring students to start from scratch with each project.
He also goes to great lengths to make sure that students understand the connections between lessons, so they are able to synthesize the information they've been taught and make connections between lessons and classes.
Lu, who says he knew at a young age that he wanted to teach, says the award is a significant honour, and that credit needs to be shared.
"I am thrilled. This is a very prestigious award and the competition is tough. I want to acknowledge the fact that these courses are not just taught by the instructor - I have the teaching assistants to thank, and we have the instructional support group which does a great job too. They all play a role in the development of the courses."
The William Hardy Alexander Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching by academic staff and is being presented to: Pam Chamberlain, who teaches English at the Augustana Faculty in Camrose, Alta.; Kathryn Chandler, in the Department of Human Ecology; and Webb Dussome, in the Department of Marketing, Business Economics and Law.
For Chamberlain, the award carries meaning not only for its intrinsic recognition of her teaching accomplishments, but for the entire faculty.
"It's almost overwhelming," she said. "It is a big deal because it is Augustana's first university-wide teaching award, so I find it very humbling and I am excited that it gets our faculty's name out there. Augustana Campus emphasizes and prides itself on high-quality teaching, so it is a great honour for me to be recognized in this particular area by this particular faculty."
"During my graduate program at the U of A, professors such as Betsy Sargent in English and Jill McClay in Education gave me a solid theoretical foundation for writing pedagogy that I try to put into practice in the classroom."
Chamberlain is an Augustana alumna who also earned an education degree at the U of A and taught in junior and senior high schools. After earning her master's degree at the U of A, she took on a sessional instructor's position at Augustana.
In teaching the mandatory English class, Chamberlain tries to relate literature to issues that are important in her students' lives. In more advanced classes, Chamberlain hopes her students will realize that they are writers.
"Students think that writers are other people who have written books, and the first key is getting them to understand that if you write, you are a writer. It is big psychological jump but it is the truth."
A 'Writer's Café' held at the end of each term, and a class anthology help drive the lessons home.
The awards were presented at a special ceremony at the Timms Centre for the Arts today.
This article originally appeared in Folio News Story