By: Sheila Evans
Of the three recipients of the Physical Sciences Teaching Prize, two have come from the Department of Chemistry, including Jesus Alvarez and Clare Keenan for their excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Winners are nominated by undergraduate students each year to honor exceptional graduate student teaching assistants. Alvarez and Keenan have both affected their undergraduate students through unique teaching styles.
“The most important thing to me in teaching is creating a space where students don’t feel the need to understand everything the first time they hear it. Asking questions about the material doesn’t mean you aren’t good at chemistry”, explains Keenan.
Alvarez explains how he leverages his role as a graduate student to help reach his students, saying “sometimes professors are far removed from where students are at, so I try to hold onto not being that far and think about what I found difficult as a student and what helped me during that time”.
Keenan also speaks to the unique role that graduate teaching assistants play in courses saying, “it can be hard to talk to the professor and maybe their lecture style isn’t working for you or is difficult to follow. Teaching assistants can be more approachable and help students feel more comfortable while working to make the lectures more accessible. I had a lot of great teaching assistants in my undergraduate education and I think that helped me be a better teaching assistant myself”.
Beyond teaching the material, both Alvarez and Keenan strive to help students change the way they think about learning. In regards to teaching Organic Chemistry, “many students are pre-med and so their approach to learning can be more focused on memorization but chemistry doesn’t work that way” explains Alvarez, “you have to get a feel for why things are happening and build intuition. I teach my students to approach situations with a big picture view and see how the new problem fits into this picture”.
Though building an enriching environment, Keenan had students come to every one of her closed office hours. “I was really happy that a lot of students would come to office hours and found it a helpful resource. Students should know that attending office hours isn’t a sign of weakness”, says Keenan.
Both Alvarez and Keenan are finishing their first year towards a Ph.D. and are excited to figure out what their future may hold. “Being busy finishing up my first year in the program, I haven’t had much time to think about what I want to do in the future," Alvarez laughs, “I enjoyed teaching but as of now, I think conducting research in a national lab is my goal”.
“I hope to stay in academia and besides my research, I do foresee myself teaching in some capacity.” says Keenan, “I think that chemistry can be intimidating and general chemistry can be seen as a weed-out class but it doesn’t have to be. It can be taught in a more accessible way”.