Manuel Ares, Jr.–Teaching Statement 2003-04
Professor in MDC Biology
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
-Dr. Suess.
Among the many feathers sported in faculty caps, none is so coveted as a nomination by one’s students for a teaching award. I am especially stunned since I seem to be one of the vikings at the teaching table, blissfully clueless about which fork to use, possessing no knowledge of forks, but certainly eating my share. I am more of a naïve-intuitive practitioner, perhaps a kind of Grandma Moses of teaching. I do not recall coming across the fancy word pedagogy until I was an assistant professor, at which time it was suggested that I develop one. I remember hearing that it was bad for a teacher to be pedagogical. Based on this I suspected that too much pedagogy might be detrimental to learning. A look in the dictionary revealed that the word goes back to an old Greek term for the slave who takes the children to and from school. This unfortunate etymology did not encourage. After 17 years at UC Santa Cruz, teaching in large undergraduate lecture courses (Microbiology, Cell Biology, Biochemistry, The Human Genome), undergraduate lab courses (Microbiology Lab, Yeast Molecular Genetics Lab), and graduate courses (Advanced Molecular Biology, Advanced Cell Biology, RNA Processing), as well as participating on thesis committees for Masters and PhD students in MCD Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Toxicology, and Computer Science, I know that having a pedagogy is good. I still plan to get one some day, perhaps when I’m not so busy teaching. I can only speculate that my students have responded to the idea that they can learn not just the known, but the unknown as well. If so, I am greatly appreciative of their attention.
A major question that I am trying to address with my teaching concerns the integration of teaching and research in the public research university. I know that sounds crazy, addressing a problem by teaching, since it makes my teaching sound like research. But I do not see teaching as very distinct from research. Research is the act of teaching ourselves, and is accomplished using the same elements we should be using to teach others. Research is one of the highest forms of learning, as it comes not wholly from others but in part by observation, experimentation, intuition, and creative synthesis. The quality of any teaching environment will be compromised by the absence of any serious research activity. Conversely, the quality of any research environment will be compromised by the absence of any serious teaching activity. Most of us agree that this is true. One way we can improve this integration is to more overtly teach students to teach themselves by engaging them in research.
Unfortunately we aren’t born knowing how to teach ourselves, or others. Thinking through new problems when all is not known is my favorite mark of an educated person, and for me represents the essence of what students should be taught. As for the rest of it, as the great philosopher Casey Stengel said long before Google was invented, “You could look it up”. As an example of what I mean, I remind students that my own research is on RNA splicing, an important process in gene function that was discussed in precisely zero of my undergraduate classes, having just been discovered during the last term of my senior year. I suggest that there must have been something more durable about my undergraduate education to allow me to even consider tackling That-About-Which-I-Learned-Nothing-In-College. There was: I learned to teach myself. I encourage them to look ahead into the future and prepare to understand things I cannot explain to them now.
Rather than focus on a digested body of extant information, I try to teach the processes needed for understanding difficult and evolving problems through research. With support from the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute, a special laboratory has been set up in which I guide 15-20 undergraduates in their research on genomics, both “wet lab” and bioinformatics (computer-based) approaches. This is not a “research experience” or a “lab class” for the students. It is research fall, winter, spring, summer, 24/7, and it goes where they take it. It is a shared experiment in integrated teaching and research at the undergraduate level. Our goal as students is to teach new things to our selves, to teach them to each other, and then to teach others by publication of our results. We first learn what we need to know, we learn whether or not it is known and to what extent, and then we decide what questions are next most pressing, and address these with experiments. Rather than telling them what I think they should know, I try to help students identify what they need in order to answer their questions, and direct them toward the resources and experiments necessary. Students in the group have a variety of complementary skills and knowledge, from biology to computer science. The students learn to learn from each other. And they learn to teach each other as well.
I have learned several interesting things from my students. First, they are not explicitly told about the research-teaching duality, its role in society and in the dynamics of the university, or its place in the rest of their lives as continuous learners. Many readily accept the word of those who would pit teaching against research, as though each impedes the other. We need more comprehensive integration of research and teaching in our curricula across the university, in every discipline, from the most basic introductory courses on up. Students should learn how research and teaching reinforce each other, and why this is a central component of an outstanding undergraduate education. Second, students are largely unaware that the faculty educates itself by going to classes called seminars. When they discover this, and find that they are welcome in such classes even though they may not understand everything, it is as though they have found another whole university, hidden in plain view. They suddenly see that their professors are students like them, a transforming realization for many. Third, the forces that work against interdisciplinary thinking, so valued by research directors, deans, and chancellors, are rooted in our undergraduate curricula. It is human nature to suppress the attractiveness of roads not taken, but choosing a major ought not to come with the cost of rejecting adjacent disciplines. If we can get students to choose majors without letting that choice limit who they will be, we will make better scholars of them all. Research and teaching are one. Perhaps I had the seeds of my pedagogy all along.
