Science enthusiast wins national teaching award

Waikato University science enthusiast wins national teaching excellence award

Waikato University biology lecturer Dr Alison Campbell has been recognised for her outstanding teaching practices with a national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award presented at a ceremony in Wellington this week.

Funded by the Tertiary Education Commission, the annual Ako Aotearoa awards acknowledge teaching practices that are student-focused and committed to promoting effective learning. They also provide an opportunity for teachers to further their careers and share their good practice with others.

Dr Campbell teaches in the Department of Biological Sciences but is better known to hundreds of secondary school students as ‘the skull lady’ thanks to her seminars on human evolution in the Waikato Experience of Biology days which she initiated eleven years ago.

“One of my biggest thrills is seeing a student’s face light up when something I’ve said strikes a chord with them,” said Dr Campbell, who started her career as a high school biology teacher.

As a teacher, she said it was her role to provide her students with more than just ‘the facts’. “One of the things I want students to take with them into their futures is an awareness of and engagement with science.” Her teaching methods include telling stories, asking questions and encouraging her students to ask their own questions, allowing them to take responsibility for their own learning.

With a long history of excellence in teaching and innovative practice, Dr Campbell makes it a priority to be aware of new things coming up in science literature and incorporating them into her teaching.

However, she is quick to point out that winning a Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award is not something one can achieve working alone. “I am constantly talking with my teaching colleagues, tutors, teaching development staff and the students themselves, and my interactions with all these other people have all positively affected my teaching practice,” she said.

Dr Campbell’s teaching reaches far beyond the University, as she holds biology teacher evenings throughout the Waikato and Bay of Plenty, and runs scholarship examination preparation days for the Ministry of Education, helping senior high school students prepare for scholarship biology exams.

Dr Campbell also reaches out to students and teachers from the University and beyond through her blog and websites. Her bioblog provides a medium for describing scientific innovations and events in a way that students can understand and identify with, and Dr Campbell also posts research papers to introduce scientific literature to students.

Dr Campbell’s Evolution for Teaching website, which provides resources for the teaching of evolution, receives about half a million page requests each month from around the world, as does her Science on the Farm website, which was developed for the Fieldays and focuses on high school curriculum.

Dr Campbell received $20,000 as part of the award, to be used to develop her teaching. Te Kahautu Maxwell, from the University’s School of Maori and Pacific Development, also received an award for excellence in tertiary teaching in the inaugural Kaupapa Māori category.

ENDS

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