Grant Pogson–Teaching Statement 2004-05
Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

I am honored to be nominated for an Excellence in Teaching award.  Although I have taught at UCSC for 10 years, I still consider myself a novice at teaching and confess to only feeling truly comfortable in the classroom in the past 3 or 4 years.  I currently teach evolutionary biology at both introductory and advanced levels.   At the introductory level I co-teach Ecology and Evolution (Biology 20C), a large class composed of students with a diverse range of backgrounds.  I also teach a senior level course in Evolution (Biology 175) that is required for many of our majors.  Every second year I teach Population Genetics (Biology 107/207) to a much smaller group of advanced undergraduates and graduate students (usually 15 to 25).

The great evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky once remarked, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”.  I consider myself extremely fortunate to teach evolution at UCSC because I believe no other subject in biology is more important or more challenging to teach.  Because of its incredible breadth, a general course in evolution simply cannot cover the evolutionary history of any group of organisms in great detail.  Instead, the course must focus on the general principles of evolution, the mechanisms responsible for causing evolution, and the major patterns of change shown by different groups of organisms.  The judicious use of examples to illustrate concepts and principles thus becomes critical.  Knowing the details of these examples is less important than understanding how they bear on a specific hypothesis or illustrate some principle.  I put considerable effort into continually revising the examples I use in my classes since they play a fundamental role in teaching students about evolution.  Students react positively to human examples and are often surprised to learn how we, like all other species, are subject to strong natural selection as well as  other evolutionary forces.

In the classroom I deliver what must be considered “conventional” lectures using overheads and the chalkboard.  I find myself spending a considerable period of time preparing for class, particularly in reviewing the details of experiments or studies to be discussed that day.  I have found my teaching to be most effective when I engage the students by posing questions or by presenting a perplexing observation.  For example, at the beginning of a class I might ask: “Why is sexual reproduction so prevalent in nature”?  At the start of another “Why do females prefer to mate with some males over others”?   In attempting to provide answers to these questions, I present competing hypotheses that are then evaluated in light of the available data.  It is not uncommon for these questions to remain unanswered since many are the subjects of ongoing research.  Students find it enlightening that controversies abound in the field of evolutionary biology and, indeed, this is a sign of a healthy and vibrant science.  The rapidly changing nature of evolutionary biology requires one to be up to date on a host of diverse topics.  This makes teaching evolution a continual learning exercise for me  – it is simply not possible for any topic to become stale.

One of the main objectives of my teaching is to train students to become evolutionary biologists.  The first step to this end requires that students obtain a solid understanding how evolution occurs within and among natural populations.  Once this foundation is laid, the next, more challenging, step is to teach students how to formulate and test evolutionary hypotheses – in other words, how to think like evolutionary biologists.  This process begins in the classroom where I present the logic and methodological approaches available for studying evolution.  It continues by challenging students with weekly assignments, study questions, or problem sets in which they must develop evolutionary hypotheses to explain a set of observations and then propose how to test their hypotheses by experiment or further observation.  These assignments are not easy and may not even have well-defined answers.  In my upper level classes in particular, it is extremely satisfying to observe the answers to these “thought experiments” improve dramatically in sophistication and quality over the course of the quarter.

I had initially thought that this goal would be too difficult for students taking an introductory class on evolution.  To my relief, I quickly realized that I was wrong.  Not only had I underestimated the potential of my students but I had also forgotten why most had become biology majors in the first place – because they love nature.  Upon entering university many biology students have considerable knowledge about the natural world and some know various organismal groups in great detail.  Despite their strong interest in biology, however, many students have not been taught much evolution in high school (unfortunately, a situation unlikely to change in the coming years).  Exposing students to evolutionary concepts and principles is particularly rewarding to me because it often fills holes in their understanding and provides the necessary framework for them to interpret and study the biological world.

Since my personal research program focuses on the study of evolutionary processes, there is a seamless integration of my research and teaching.  I commonly use my own genetic data collected from past studies to illustrate various evolutionary principles.  Recently, in my Population Genetics class I had students assist me in my ongoing research by helping collect DNA sequence data on several genes that are the current focus of study in my lab.  The students also helped me by performing various statistical tests and simulations on recently collected data using their own personal computers.  By involving the class in my ongoing research, the students were able to directly observe how one collects, analyzes, and, most importantly, interprets genetic data.  Of course, some things did not work out as planned and now every student wants to be a co-author on the resulting paper!

Teaching evolution is particularly rewarding to me because few other fields of biology have the potential to alter one’s view of the natural world.  I hope that my teaching fosters in my students what the late Ernst Mayr has called “evolutionary thinking” in which organisms become understood in the context of their evolutionary histories.  Adopting an evolutionary perspective often necessitates a profound reshaping of one’s personal worldview.  It requires an expansion of one’s time horizon to consider the outcome of billions of years of evolution on our planet.  It requires that students appreciate the fundamental role that diversity (both within and between species) plays in enabling the evolutionary process.  It requires one to reevaluate our own species’ position in nature.  Personally, I have found the adoption of these perspectives to be both liberating and exhilarating.  I hope that my students feel the same way.  At the very end of “On the Origin of Species”, Darwin wrote:

“There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.

As a teacher, I can do no better than to convince students that Darwin was, as usual, correct.