Organismic & Evolutionary Biology

Mark Wright

My efforts this year as Pedagogy Fellow for OEB prioritized strengthening year-to-year continuity of our department’s pedagogy course. A lot of information could be lost with annual turnover of the teaching team. In addition to developing lesson plans for each day of the year-long course, I have organized a Google Drive folder for the course that is easy to navigate and well-documented. My hope is that this work enables future Pedagogy Fellows to have a clearer understanding of how the course has run in the past as they continue to improve it for the future.

View Mark's capstone project.

Denise Yoon

My work this year focused on strengthening the first year graduate seminar course, OEB399, and creating a curriculum that prepares grad students for their life and teaching at Harvard and in OEB. By centering community within the G1 cohort and providing structure and real experience with pedagogical techniques, I hoped to provide a space in which first year students can grow and thrive with their colleagues and begin to find their place in their labs and within OEB. By creating learning modules that will stay with the department after my tenure as the Pedagogy Fellow, I hope that future OEB399 classes will be high quality and standardized from year to year.

In addition to the work that I did in restructuring the overall course content, I also emphasized principles of inclusive teaching, creating a unit on inclusive pedagogy, which involved workshops, a panel from the History of Science department, and case studies on LGBTQ+ inclusive language in collaboration with Roya Huang, a former PF in MCB.

View Denise's capstone project.

Nick Herrmann

One goal of OEB’s pedagogy course is to help first-year students form a positive community. To that end, I gave students the opportunity to “share their story,” which I modeled during our first class. I talked for about 8 minutes about where I’m from, my family, my work, and my hobbies, and then I took questions. Over the rest of the year, 15 of 18 students opted to share their own stories. Acclimating to graduate school remotely is not easy. Still, I think many students ended the year feeling connected to their classmates and to the department.

View Nick's capstone project.

Ava Mainieri

Every 4th year OEB graduate student is required to present their research at a department-wide symposium during the spring of their G4. In preparation for the symposium, I created several workshops to help with public speaking and presentation preparation. These included sessions on oration, figure design, and practice talks. These workshops were designed not only to inspire graduate students to attend, but provide tools applicable to all areas of science communication.

View Ava's capstone project.