2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 16: Work in Progress: Designing a course to equip Bioengineering graduate students with effective and equitable teaching skills

Presented at Biomedical Engineering Division (BED) Poster Session

Graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) have integral roles in teaching and cultivating classroom communities. By applying inclusive teaching practices, TAs can promote a sense of community and belonging within their departments through their interactions with students, staff, and faculty. Proper pedagogical training enables TAs to clearly communicate in their graduate and post-graduate careers, improve the quality of undergraduate education, and reduce the teaching time commitment for faculty instructors. Unfortunately, graduate students in STEM are often expected to serve as TAs without sufficient training in pedagogical best practices. To meet this need, we have designed and implemented a graduate student-led course titled “Promoting Effective and Equitable Teaching in Bioengineering”.

Our quarter-long discussion-based seminar course aims to train graduate TAs to be effective and equitable educators and communicators throughout their careers. The course has three primary learning objectives. Participants should be able to (1) build practical skills for defining and accomplishing course or communication objectives; (2) implement actionable inclusive strategies to foster belonging and equity within the (classroom) community; and (3) develop a tangible plan for applying effective teaching and communication skills to achieve personal and professional goals.
In this Work in Progress, we outline a plan to rigorously evaluate the efficacy of the course through participant accomplishment of stated learning goals, as well as the long-term impact of our course participants in their roles as TAs within the bioengineering department. We hypothesize that course participants will develop practical pedagogical expertise and build self-efficacy as educators, empowering them to contribute more effectively to learning environments as TAs in the future. We hope that this work in progress will catalyze the implementation of similar training-based courses across departments and institutions to improve the pedagogical preparation of graduate TAs.

Authors

Callan E. Monette http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-1859-114X Stanford University [biography]

Callan Monette (she/her/hers) is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Stanford University. She believes that communicating science in an accessible and equitable way is an essential skill and responsibility for every scientist, and she is committed to building these skills and creating training opportunities for scientists and engineers at every experience level to practice and value inclusive pedagogy. Callan is a graduate teaching consultant with the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning, a co-coordinator of the Bioengineering TA program, and a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow at Stanford.
Dr. Alexis Seymour Stanford University [biography]

Alexis Seymour (she/her/hers) recently completed her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at Stanford University. She believes that clear and effective teaching through communication is integral to our professional and personal lives and that teaching is not truly effective unless it is also equitable. While completing her doctorate, Alexis worked to create opportunities for graduate students to learn these essential communication skills through her work as a TA Mentor, a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow, a co-coordinator of the Bioengineering TA program, and an instructor for a TA-focused pedagogy training course at Stanford.
William T Yu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8122-0811 Stanford University [biography]

Will Yu (he/him/his) is a second-year Ph.D. student in BioEngineering at Stanford University. As a former Math and Physics Teaching Fellow at Phillips Academy, Will is passionate about STEM education and currently serves as a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow at Stanford.
Leighton Terrance Wan Stanford University [biography]

Leighton Wan (he/him/his) is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering at Stanford University. Beyond his research on developing affinity reagents for biosensors, he has sought to build inclusive and equitable communities. He has served as a co-coordinator for the Bioengineering TA program, a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow, and a Community Associate with Stanford’s Graduate Life Office.
Andrew Sho Perley http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2962-6245 Stanford University, Department of Bioengineering [biography]

Andrew Perley (he/him/his) is a 4th-year PhD candidate in the Bioengineering department at Stanford University. He has always had a passion for helping others learn from a young age and continues to strive to learn new ways to provide equitable opportunity for all learners. Andrew strongly believes that it is our job as educators to help students find confidence in their ability to learn and build community with others. In pursuit of building more inclusive and equitable systems in education, he strives to learn new ways to affect how we implement education at the department and school level. Andrew serves as a co-coordinator for the Bioengineering TA program and is a Leadership in Inclusive Teaching Fellow at Stanford University.
Ross Daniel Venook http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0582-5151 Stanford University [biography]

Ross is a Lecturer in the Bioengineering department and is the Associate Director for Engineering in the Biodesign program. He is also an R&D Fellow at Boston Scientific Neuromodulation, and he advises and works with non-profit and early-stage companies.

An Electrical Engineer by training, Ross built and applied new types of MRI hardware for interventional and device-related uses during graduate school. Following a Biodesign Innovation fellowship, Ross helped to start the MRI safety program at Boston Scientific Neuromodulation, where he has worked for over a decade across the MRI safety community to create and improve international standards and to enable safe MRI access for patients with implanted medical devices.

At Stanford, Ross primarily leads undergraduate lab courses. He also supports a variety of courses and runs hands-on workshops on prototyping and systems engineering.

Download paper (722 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session