Meet Erica Jeffery!
Tell us about your academic and professional trajectory before you joined UBC Zoology
I did my first year of undergrad at University of Alberta (closer to my hometown) and then transferred to the University of Lethbridge for the remainder. After completing my undergrad, I went to Taiwan for a few months to teach English and learn Mandarin (don’t ask me to speak it, I have the vocabulary of a toddler) — it was a really interesting teaching and learning, experience for me. After I returned, I joined Bernie Crespi’s evolutionary biology lab at Simon Fraser University for a master's degree. I considered coming to UBC for a PhD, but ultimately ended up staying at SFU; there was a strong evolutionary behavioural ecology focus there, which fit well with my interests. I was a PhD student in Bernie Roitberg’s group for a while, but kept being drawn in by teaching-related positions, and eventually got hired into my current position here at UBC: Science Education Specialist in the Department of Zoology. As a graduate student, I spent a lot of years thinking about biology, collecting and working with data, and being a TA. I love biology and science, but ultimately found teaching and working with instructors and students a lot more motivating and rewarding than my actual thesis work.
Professionally, education and biology seem to be your main interest. Was this manifested early on in your life?
I was always interested in teaching and learning in one capacity or another, even in high school. I taught swimming lessons in high school as part of a lifeguard role at the local pool in a small town in Alberta. It was my first experience as an instructor working with kids. It was so much fun! At the time, I wanted to become a high school math teacher - that’s what I wrote in all of my scholarship applications. Between high school and the start of my undergrad, I went to France for a year as an exchange student and stayed with a family who were both high school biology teachers. I found math, with its abstract jargon, was surprisingly difficult to follow in another language. Biology, with all its images and diagrams, was much easier. So, when I came back to Canada for undergrad, I decided to focus on biology and really fell in love with the theory side of things, especially evolutionary theory. I’ve always found it fascinating when evidence and logic contradict beliefs and assumptions, and finding ways of getting past those beliefs and assumptions towards a better understanding is so rewarding. I think teaching and learning are two things that are innately rewarding, even though it might not always feel like that, when our current structures and other roles get in the way. People talk about how rewarding it is to witness students having that “lightbulb moment” — I think of it as a moment of human connection, when you see the same ideas that are in your head mirrored in someone else. My perspectives on teaching and learning have changed as I’ve gained more experience and worked with people on different projects, though. Now I’m more interested in understanding who the learner is in the holistic sense: what motivates them, what draws them in, what tires them or doesn’t interest them, what conceptual framework are they coming to things with? So, it's not just about trying to get someone else to understand you, it’s also about you trying to understand them. More and more, I think that it's really important to reach that point of understanding as a basis for going through a teaching and learning experience with somebody.
When you mentioned your graduate years at Simon Fraser, TAing was a very important component, and arguably a defining component in your professional life. What advice do you have for graduate students that feel the same way?
I think it’s not uncommon for graduate students to find TAing just as, or even more, fulfilling than the work they are doing for their thesis. If someone is interested in pursuing a teaching-focused career in academia, I think the most important thing is to keep your eyes and ears open for any opportunities to get more involved in that side of things and jump on anything that comes your way — one thing will lead to another. In my case, I completed a Certificate Program in University Teaching and Learning for Graduate Students as a PhD student at SFU, which helped me get my first position as a research associate on a biology teaching and learning project at UBC; that led to another project, which then led to positions as a teaching and learning fellow and sessional instructor in the Biology program. Ultimately, having a combination of experience with education research as well as experience being the instructor of record for a course set me up well for my current position.
When I was a graduate student, there didn’t seem to be a lot of people interested in the intersection of pedagogical practice and science. Nowadays, it is much more common to hear about people engaging in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) or other discipline-based education research, and I think the related job market has become more competitive.
The good news is that there are a lot of opportunities at UBC for graduate students who are interested in STEM education, especially if they are interested in taking an academic approach to teaching:
- Biology TA Development and Advancement (TADA) Series
- TADA is a series of workshops focusing on evidence-based and inclusive pedagogical practices, directed towards graduate students who are teaching biology courses at UBC. Workshops are mainly developed and facilitated by experienced TAs (and getting involved as a TA facilitator is a great way to gain experience as an educational developer/support person). Announcements about workshops are sent out to Biology TA, and Zoology and Botany grad student email lists. You can also enroll in the TADA Canvas site to access online resources and modules.
- UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology (CTLT)
- The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is a three-day workshop focused on developing and enhancing instructional skills; the Foundations of Pedagogy course is an 8-week course focused on pedagogical theory and its application. You can take either course independently, but both the ISW and Foundations of Pedagogy also serve as pre-requisites for other certification programs (e.g., CIRTL and CATL).
- The Certificate Program in Advanced Teaching and Learning (CATL) for graduate students is a one-year program that includes a teaching practicum, mentoring, and a small-scale SoTL project. (CATL website)
- The Centre for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) provides programming to support grad student and postdoc professional development in pedagogical scholarship and practice (including Teaching as Research internships — see below). (CIRTL website)
- The CTLT also provides a wide variety of other supports and programming for teaching and learning, some of it specifically for graduate students (list of CTLT Graduate Student and TA Programs).
- STEM Education Projects
- There are a growing number of graduate students who engage in some form of education research as part of their thesis work. For some, STEM education research is their principal research area; they would be supervised or co-supervised by a faculty member who is in an Education Leadership (tenure-track teaching faculty) role or in the Faculty of Education, and their research funding would come from somewhere like SSHRC or another fund that directly supports educational research. For others, biology research is the core of their thesis, but, with the support of their supervisor, one of their thesis chapters includes an education research component (if this had been an option when I was in graduate school, I definitely would have done it!). This work might be funded by UBC funding for teaching and learning projects, or a dedicated scholarship (see examples below).
- Teaching as Research (TAR) internships (offered through CIRTL@UBC) pair a graduate student with a teaching partner (e.g., course instructor) to work on an education research project; this could be a novel project devised by the student or part of an existing project. TAR interns are often funded through a UBC Public Scholars Award (i.e., held by the intern) or through existing project funding (i.e., Teaching & Learning Fund grant held by the project PI).
- Faculty members with funding for education research projects are often looking for engaged, experienced graduate students to serve as research associates (typically a Graduate Academic Assistant position that would be held for one term in lieu of a TAship); experience as a TA, familiarity with evidence-based and inclusive teaching practices, and transferrable academic skills (e.g., ability to conduct literature reviews, data analysis, report/presentation writing) are assets. These opportunities are not always widely advertised, though, so if you are interested in this type of work, it’s important to let potential PIs (e.g., instructors) know! You can also reach out to one of the Biology SESs (erica.jeffery@ubc.ca or christine.goedhart@botany.ubc.ca), who may know of relevant projects that are underway.
Tell us more about your job and how it has evolved
When I started my first research associate position at UBC, the Carl Weiman Science Education Initiative (CWSEI) was well underway. As part of the initiative, many Science departments had hired Science Teaching and Learning Fellows (i.e., education-focused post-doctoral fellows with a background in science research and teaching) to collaborate with instructors in introducing evidence-based teaching practices to specific courses. There are advantages to having pedagogical support from someone with discipline-specific knowledge and skills, and also to having support from someone who is familiar with your particular academic program. So, when the time came for the Carl Wieman initiative to wrap-up, the Faculty of Science created Science Education Specialist (SES) positions, to continue providing individualized support to science programs and to act as liaisons between departments and the Science Centre for Teaching and Learning (Skylight).
Currently, there is an equivalent of my position in most of the science departments: Botany, Chemistry, Computer Science, EOAS (Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences), Mathematics, Microbiology & Immunology, Physics and Astronomy, and Zoology all have an SES. We meet regularly with other colleagues in Skylight to find out what's going on and to share knowledge and strategies. We also support programming and initiatives across the Faculty of Science (for example, this term we are supporting a cross-departmental initiative to improve lab accessibility in Science lab courses at UBC and in the spring, we host an annual Science Education Open House). It’s incredibly helpful to have such a broad, supportive network of people I can call upon and collaborate with; if an instructor asks me a question and I don’t know the answer, I know I can always find someone who does.
As Biology program support staff, I do a lot of different things: I work individually with instructors to develo and implement ideas for teaching or related research; I provide personalized support for professional development; I support larger scale, multi-course or cross-curriculum projects; I help organize events, seminars, and workshops for the Biology teaching community. I feel lucky that I have a job that allows me a bit of freedom to pursue my own interests in teaching and learning, but that also lets me be useful to other people. Instructors have so much passion and so many great ideas, and so little time. I try to do what I can to lower the activation required to engage in important teaching-related activities that are not immediately related to surviving the term.
Tell us about your favourite hobby
I have two young kids, so that influences what hobbies fit into my life at the moment. I used to spend a lot of time doing things like painting, reading, knitting, hiking and backpacking, and making and eating delicious food. These days we spend a lot of time biking as a family, swimming, and playing board games. Something I’ve recently done for myself — I grew up with a piano and took piano lessons, but after leaving home I didn’t have consistent access to a piano. I just recently bought an electric piano and it has been amazing because if I am working from home, I can just take a five-minute break from work and play a piece; it’s a bite-sized brain break. And those five-minutes, if you can really focus — like, really focus — on a satisfying activity for just five-minutes, it can completely reset you: make your headache go away, make your little worries vanish, refresh you… and then you’re ready to go back to whatever you were working on. Buying a piano has been a great investment in my own wellbeing, so that’s something I’m excited about.