A nomination for a teaching award is a terrific way to celebrate my first decade of teaching at UCSC. I teach a variety of undergraduate courses that all pertain to the evolution, ecology and behavior of organisms — General Ecology, Behavioral Ecology Field Course and Ornithology. I enjoy teaching a great deal and find it enormously satisfying to impact the way students think about their world. I also regularly involve undergraduates as research assistants on my research projects. Most of these students describe the experience as transformative, and I never cease to delight in their epiphanies as they make the transition from learning about research second-hand to being researchers themselves. Two overarching goals are central to my teaching: to teach students the scientific method as it is actually practiced by scientists, through the use of case histories and the students’ own direct field experience, and to pique interest in natural history.

My teaching philosophy and style is strongly shaped by my own experience as an undergraduate in a biology program. I figured out very early in life that I wanted to be a biologist but was disappointed to discover, upon arriving at university, that the curriculum consisted largely of courses requiring endless memorization of 'facts'.  My scientific epiphany occurred when I took a seminar style course where concepts and ideas were emphasized over facts.  I remember vividly realizing that one becomes a scientist simply by thinking critically about things. The pioneering ecologist Robert MacArthur succinctly summarized this issue, and I share his words with my ecology undergraduates on the first day of class: "To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply accumulate facts." However, I am also aware that many of the students I teach do not go on to academic or scientific careers and feel that an important role as a university professor in science is to educate these students to be scientific ambassadors in their future lives. Science plays an important role in society and many decisions the public makes are often influenced by scientific research (e.g. is global warming real, or a hoax as at least one US Senator maintains?) — yet it is often misunderstood. Accordingly, a key goal is to assist and encourage students to think for themselves and to realize that science is nothing more than a framework for rigorously considering and weighing alternative ideas.

One way I engage students and get them hooked on looking for patterns in nature is to share with them photographs I have taken over the past thirty years as a semi-professional photographer. These photographs, which include a wide array of plants and animals, habitats from around the world, and images of scientific studies and methods in action, vividly illustrate the topics I cover in lecture and make them more tangible for the students. The students' teaching evaluations are overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the teaching value of the photographs.   Other than for digital slideshows, I find the old-fashioned chalk, blackboard and discussion format to be more effective for engaging students in the lecture material than Powerpoint presentations.

I put a tremendous amount of time considering and revising the material I cover in classes.  When choosing materials, I look for three important attributes: case histories that clearly illustrate key concepts in the field I am teaching about; studies that exemplify powerful experimental design or new and creative ways of testing ideas and hypotheses; and illustrations of how extremely bizarre and interesting organisms can be, with the goal of generating questions from the students and piquing their interest in natural history. The latter is exemplified with a video clip I show from David Attenborough's Life of Birds series: we see an adult warbler that has been duped into raising and feeding a cuckoo chick that is five times its own size. This clip invariably elicits gasps and laughter from the students, followed by at least thirty minutes of insightful questions from them about the evolutionary paradox they have just observed. These sorts of freewheeling brainstorming sessions are a teaching highlight both for me and the students — they are the closest one can get to doing real science inside a lecture hall of 200 students. For the students, it is exciting and empowering to learn that their questions — motivated simply from the behaviors they observe in the video and the general principles they have learned in class — often turn out to be the cutting edge questions that are currently at the forefront of the field. These brainstorming sessions are such important learning experiences that I am always willing engage in them even though it means I that we may not cover everything that was planned for the lecture.

Many of the key concepts in Ecology are based on mathematical models, for example population growth and population dynamics. I firmly believe that models are only worth teaching, and learning, if students learn where these models come from and understand their underlying biological assumptions. The teaching innovation of which I am proudest is a six part set of Microsoft Excel exercises (the 'Excel-ent Ecologist') that teach students the basics of building their own population models and then explore a variety of key mathematical models in Ecology.  The exercises allow students to explore the dynamic aspects of the models in a way that simply cannot be grasped from reading a textbook or sitting in a lecture.  Most importantly, by requiring that students enter data, make predictions about what they expect to happen and then observe the outcomes of the models, students practice being population biologists as well as solidify their understanding of the models.

As does much of the public in general, university students often have misguided ideas about both science and what life as a scientist entails. In my lectures and in my own research, where I employ undergraduate field assistants, I try to emphasize the personalities involved in scientific discovery, the role for creativity and just how fun the whole process can be as a collaborative enterprise carried out in amazing places. It is always a pleasure to watch the students realize that science is a lot more fun than they had been lead to believe.  My success in conveying science as an exciting career choice was highlighted by a student who came up to me after class one day, grinning, and said "I want your job".