Being a teacher

People often ask me what it is exactly I do, and in technical terms, I have a somewhat unque Faculty position at the University of British Columbia, with no clear Department that I can call my home. This means that whilst I am often out of the proverbial UBC loop, I am also happily privy to an enormous amount of autonomy in the types of projects I can pursue. In effect, Michael (Smith) did a wonderful job of setting up a tenured university "education" position where there is an unprecedented amount of freedom to follow up on worthy pursuits as the lab sees fit.

And what might be a worthy pursuit? Well, given Michael's role in the what was then the burgeoning field of molecular biology, he was clever enough to realize that science education was particularily crucial at both the academic professional level (the "make scientists better at what they do" thing), and at the grassroots level (the "whoa, the public really needs to get in on this" thing). a.k.a I have a mandate to work with both the scientist and the public.

In terms of the scientific community, my role is fairly easy to describe. I'm a geneticist and biochemist by training, and so the advanced courses I teach relate directly to these skills. You can even sign up for one of these courses yourself (just finished one actually), and I promise regardless of your background, I will teach you the ropes in molecular techniques so that you can be comfortable, perhaps even savy, with these exciting biological tools.

In terms of the public community, my main philosophy is to get folks to realize that science is complicated, but not unreachable, and certainly deserving of everyone's attention if only because,.. well... it matters too much nowadays. Things like GMOs, infectious diseases, alternative fuels, stem cells, cloning, climate change (to name a few), are unabashedly important to one's mental, economic, environmental, and even cultural health these days, and whilst it's wonderful to have an opinion and all, my take on it is that to do the opinion justice, a person needs to indulge themselves in the understanding of the nuts and bolts behind the matter.

Because, I think people will find that each and everyone of these issues can be notoriously grey - that if you sit in one camp's hang out long enough, you'll start to say to yourself "this sounds about right," and yet if you dare visit the other camp for an equivalent amount of time, I'll bet you'll also come away saying, "o.k. some of that also makes sense." In other words, perspective is really what drives an informed opinion.

All this, by the way, has fairly recently led me to this science writing thing. Because I think it's a powerful avenue, and also because I think I can bring something different to that particular table.

Anyway, this all converges on the prospect of asking (as Seed happens to be) what I think makes a good science teacher. A short answer is that it's probably the same as whatever it takes to be a good teacher, period. A slightly longer answer is to say that I think this is basically a fluid thing, dependant on the topic, the audience, and on the gravitas of that particular moment in time as you attempt to engage a person's (or many persons) minds. In other words, it is very much a feedback sort of thing, and I suppose if there's any particular skill that I would deem especially useful, it's the ability to sense that aura of engagement (or lack thereof) so that your tactics can change accordingly.