Lunch Lecture: A Biologist’s Journey into the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
Have you ever been surprised by students’ performance on an assignment, or noticed how a small change in your teaching approach can significantly influence student participation and engagement? Scholarly teaching often begins with this kind of curiosity and leads to clearer, more focused questions about student learning and the learning environments we create — whether in classrooms or in the field.
In this week’s LunchLecture, Dr. Michelle Harris, adjunct instructor at the University Centre of the Westfjords, presents her talk “A Biologist’s Journey into the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.”
In the lecture, she explores how curiosity about her own teaching — for example, when student performance or engagement produced unexpected outcomes — became the starting point for a scholarly approach to teaching and learning (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, SoTL). She describes how she drew on her background as a biologist to systematically examine questions and challenges that emerged from her teaching practice, and how this work evolved into Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER).
She will share examples of collaborative SoTL and DBER projects and resulting publications, highlight useful resources, and summarize key lessons that may support educators who wish to begin — or continue — their own scholarly teaching journey.
Dr. Michelle Harris earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1999, specializing in vertebrate functional morphology. She taught honors Biocore students for 23 years, working with some of the most highly motivated and inspiring students at UW–Madison.
Throughout her research and teaching, she has viewed the world through a lens that seeks connections between form and function — a perspective that has shaped her teaching and learning research across biological phyla, size scales, and scientific disciplines. She retired in 2022 as Emeritus Teaching Faculty.
The lunch lecture will be held in english
The presentation will take place in the cafeteria at the University Centre of the Westfjords and will start at 12:10.