Teaching

As a teacher, I strive to create a welcoming and engaging classroom that encourages students to learn by developing curiosity-driven scientific mindsets. My pedagogy emphasizes evidence-based teaching practices (e.g., active learning as defined by the higher education literature), fostering cohesion through interactive lectures and group discussions, creating an inclusive classroom with mutually agreed-upon community guidelines, and showcasing the vast scientific achievements by scholars of diverse identities whose work has been historically overlooked. My teaching philosophy emphasizes mentorship, collaboration, and the classroom as a space to bridge research and learning. Jumping spiders are especially amenable to undergraduate research, both in the laboratory and classroom, because they are easy to collect and maintain, allow clusters of students to collect complementary datasets across semesters, and support inquiry spanning natural history, field, behavioral, morphological, neural and computational levels. I look forward to creating more opportunities to work with and support students.

I have spent several semesters teaching an upper-level animal behavior lab at UMass, which entails teaching students the various steps of the scientific process using a scaffolded approach (observation, questions, hypotheses, predictions, data collection, nonparametric statistics, figure-making, and scientific writing), and overseeing end-of-semester independent projects. This helps students build confidence in collecting, analyzing, and presenting data. I leverage this approach, along with bringing research experiences directly into the classroom, to create an exciting student-centric learning environment. Students in my classes have created their own very creative research projects and collected novel data! Projects have included: testing the vibration frequencies at which web-building spiders approach an ensnared object; measuring how fast mussels filter algae-rich water under different temperature regimes; investigating whether “loser” crayfish after a territorial dispute are less likely to explore a novel arena; assessing whether bumblebees are more likely to visit nearby flowers than distant ones; examining whether the sudden reveal of a model coyote predator increases vigilance in small versus large groups of foraging geese; determining whether flight initiation distance and tail flagging behavior differs between urban and rural squirrels; and quantifying bird visitation rates to test predictions of optimal foraging models at feeders, among many others.

From this, I designed my own freshman seminar course entitled “Secret Sensory Worlds.” This course was supported by the Teaching Fellows Program at UMass, which is offered by the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning network. The purpose of this course is to teach students the basics of sensory biology using fun and relatable examples before they take upper-level courses. Instead of traditional exams, I use in-class activities (featuring many cool demonstrations and animals!) as well as at-home projects for students to explore topics and create original work in ways that align with their strengths and interests, such as through creative arts or written reports. Many of these assignments involve structured feedback and allow students iterative opportunities to refine their work, much like how the scientific process unfolds. Student feedback from this course has been tremendously positive!

Secret Sensory Worlds (FYS 191 CNS)

How do animals perceive their surroundings? In the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” prisoners able to see only the dancing shadows of a flame neglect to consider the hidden objects that cast them. We, too, are forced to create our own representation of reality using a mere sliver of filtered information. The cleverest human, smallest fly, and grandest whale are all confined to their self-centered worlds crafted by the senses. In this class, we will exit Plato’s Cave and explore our own senses to better understand the secret lives of animals. Along the way, we will stumble upon some peculiar abilities, like ghost knifefish that speak with electric pulses, and bats that listen to a sea of echoes.