Teaching Statement

I thoroughly enjoy both teaching and student supervision, and I am very interested in ways to make teaching and supervision both inspirational and relevant to the students’ career paths. I have published an opinion piece about creativity in teaching – entitled Entomology and the art of creativity.

My overall goal with teaching is to teach students how to learn and encourage them to seek knowledge. Each semester, I tailor my teaching to the interests and experiences within the student cohort, as I believe students engage and participate much more, if they can see clear connections and relevance between the theoretical course topics and concepts and their own experiences and interests. Through my teaching it is also my hope to convey the important notion that science is not as clear-cut as some may think… That scientists make subjective choices and that many basic concepts and elements in life are very poorly defined - example, pleased define a “forest”…? Accordingly, students need to accept the notion that there will always be enormous gaps in our knowledge, our decision-making will always be imperfect. The best we can do is to justify our choices as well as we can (based on existing body of science and scientific logic), and then we need to maintain a high level of communication among team members, so that everybody operate according to similar assumptions and expectations.

As a mentor and teacher of graduate and undergraduate students, I see it as my main role to help and assist each individual along their academic process. As a Dane, my perception of academic education is that of “acquiring LEGO blocks” – with as many shapes, sizes, and colors as possible – each student can configure their own future. My role in that process is to help them identify which LEGO blocks they should decide to acquire – which skill sets to learn and which experiences to obtain.