Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
Virgil, Georgica, lib. 21.
A Personalist Pedagogy
My overarching pedagogical principle is to teach the person underlying the student, with their unique differences in learning, motivations, intellectual values, and past experiences. I aim to meet students where they are specifically coming from. I have come from and have experience with different kinds of students, and can adapt my approach and tailor as much as possible to the specific challenges with those currently enrolled in any given class.
Tensegrity: Structures of Learning
Notes on Bloom’s taxonomy and other hierarchical structures
We tend to use metaphors for building when we think of knowledge. We build on strong foundations; we first lay the groundwork. We have a foundation of knowledge and then we build on that prior knowledge. We have a framework of learning, and we might use a scaffold and construct with building blocks of knowledge. The building metaphor emphasizes strong foundations to be able to hold up the upper levels. Bloom’s Taxonomy is often conceived of as a pyramid of cognitive development with remembering facts at the bottom and creative activities at the top. This can readily become a static and rather stationary metaphor like in the case above. And this can readily become a hierarchical metaphor. When there are higher and lower values, the most valuable is at the top. The aim of treading the lower levels is largely to arrive at the top. Scaffolds, similarly, are to be removed once you build the structure.The higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and its equivalents involve the learn-by-doing activities that most educators, including myself, value. However, teaching lower levels is sometimes seen as menial academic labor.
But when we remove the hierarchical connotations of these different cognitive functions, we see they mutually reinforce another and are all required to possess full knowledge of a subject. Retrieval of information reinforces what was rote memorization, and applying the knowledge reinforces the information in long-term memory and increases pathways of recollection. If we retain the building metaphor, we would have an example of the upper levels somehow buttressing the foundations. Take, for example, when we learn a language by trying to speak, read, and write instead of just remembering vocabulary and grammar. One still needs a modicum of vocabulary and grammar, but once you learn the basics, it is learn-by-doing from there on. The vocabulary and grammar can keep growing, but the language faculty will be increased with a combination of active learning.
Metaphors can be useful when their nuances and limitations are recognized. I say we keep the metaphor of buildings and structures. But we must acknowledge that in the architecture of cognitive development, although there is an order to building and scaffolds need to be in place, ultimately instead of the bottom supporting the top levels, the levels mutually reinforce one another as in tensegrity structures.
Teaching Experience
PLB 111 Plant Physiology
University of California, Davis
Associate Instructor (2024)
Teaching Assistant (2020-2023)
PLB 111D Problems in Plant Physiology
University of California, Davis
- Teaching Assistant (2020-2023)
Teaching Highlights
In the Fall of 2024 at the University of California, Davis, I implemented a gamified web-based tool Midterm Flight Simulator (MFS), which contributed to substantially improving measurable outcomes in retrieval and mathematical problem-solving in Plant Physiology (PLB111).
Footnotes
Fortunate is the one who can know the causes of things. Virgil, Georgics, book 2↩︎