Excellence in teaching
Associate Professor Alan Harvey, Dept of Anatomy and Human Biology, has been teaching neuroscience at UWA to both medical and science undergraduates for the past 11 years. He won an Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994. These awards represent a joint effort by the Guild and the University to recognise and reward exemplary teaching.
At first year level, I try to arouse the students' curiosity by posing questions and by asking them to think about why and how they do things during normal day-to-day activities. To give you an example, I have been at UWA for some years and am known to a few people around campus; so how is it that those that do know me do not immediately recognise me from the photograph at the top of this page? Admittedly I am from the UK and this is how family and friends 'up yonder' think of me, but a more scientific explanation may be that, while there are - amazingly enough - nerve cells responsive to faces in areas of human cerebral cortex, most of these cells respond less well to faces presented upside down. At third year level, in the Advanced Neural Science course, the student group is smaller and the teaching is less didactic than in previous years. Information given to the students is as up-to-date as possible and often relates to current 'hot' topics and controversies. It is perhaps here that the benefits of having active researchers teaching undergraduates are the most obvious. Students are encouraged to appraise critically the information they are given and are involved in a number of self-directed learning activities, including a journal club and the preparation of an essay and seminar on a review topic of their own choice. In the journal club, students are not always given 'good' journal articles to read and comment on. They are sometimes given flawed or poorly presented work to review - can they tell the difference? There is tremendous pressure on Universities to re-evaluate and even justify their role in education. In the teaching of neuroscience to medical students I am, of course, involved in goal-oriented training, but in the science courses I do not expect every student to turn into a fully fledged neuroscientist. Some do indeed enter postgraduate research programs, but others become laboratory technicians, PE instructors, high school teachers or public health officers. The nature of the job is not necessarily so important. In my view what is important is to give students the confidence to think, to criticise, to access and analyse data bases, to assemble and dissect information and, finally, to give them the tools with which they can learn to focus and channel their intellects. |
The human brain is a tremendously complex structure. It is the basis of human behaviour, cognition, memory - for much of what we define as human. Necessarily, the subject matter is not easy and students must work hard to gain an understanding of the area. It is therefore vital that information is given with clarity, in a logical order, sometimes with humour and, most importantly, in a way that engenders the attention and interest of each student. This is what I attempt to do.