Each summer, the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering provides an opportunity for graduate students to obtain teaching experience under the direction of an experienced faculty member. The participants of the program have the chance to assist teaching on-campus, non-credit, introductory university-level courses in chemical and biological engineering to international students in the Vancouver Summer Program, while getting feedback on development of teaching, learning and assessment materials and the delivery of lectures, tutorials and labs. I have participated in this program in 2017 and 2018 and taught several lectures in an introductory-level biological engineering course to the international students.
- Teaching approach
The Chemical and Biological Engineering (CHBE) Vancouver Summer Program is a four-week (non-credit) academic program offered by the CHBE department to international students to challenge them academically while giving them an opportunity to experience Canadian culture and society and improving their English skills. CHBE offers an instructor trainee program through VSP in which graduate students interested in teaching get to teach all or parts of the package while being guided by supervising faculty members through the preparation and delivery of course material. I have been participating in this program for the past 2 years and taught the introduction to Biological Engineering package. In my lectures, I implement an interactive approach to engage international students and make the course more fun for them. Here I put higher emphasis on student interactions and designs games and activities such as Kahoot (Multiple choice response questions), and Jeopardy with incentives for participation and performance. In terms of the technical content I uses a problem-based approach to introduce the topics and have students come up with solutions for a presented problem. For example, in my tissue engineering lecture, I introduce a bone fracture that requires a bone graft implantation and asks students to design the best graft while walking them through the components and essential considerations of the design. My goal here is to teach students critical thinking and being able to judge another design based on the theory provided.
- Teaching interventions
Learning biological engineering terminology can become extremely challenging for students who does not have the background in the field and are not familiar with the Latin-rooted words to describe different concepts in biology. Therefore, the first step is providing the foundation of these terminologies and technical language of the field, which is even of more importance for the international students enrolled in the program. To this end, I have designed the Jeopardy games on different topics of my lectures in VSP and helped students learn the technical content through a fun game. It should be noted that the game was planned a couple of sessions after the first introduction to the concepts to help student remember the technical terms.
- Challenges
The most challenging part of teaching such program is the diversity of the students’ enrolled in the course in terms of their backgrounds, and field of study. Some of these international students were majoring in engineering (not necessarily biomedical/biological engineering) while some others were from a science background with minimal exposure to engineering design concepts. Therefore, designing the content to match the needs of such a diverse audience becomes challenging. Besides coming from different cultures, it is challenging to establish a Canadian-style atmosphere where the instructor plays a discussion facilitator’s role rather than lecturing to the class and demands everyone’s involvement and engagement. To mitigate this, I would like to set a clear community agreement and course guidelines at the beginning, so students are clear about the in-class expectations and responsibilities of both themselves and the instructor.