Thuy has been a faculty member in the Biology Department at Camosun College since 1999. Thuy was finishing her master’s in molecular and developmental genetics, and had transferred into the PhD program, but after passing the PhD qualifying exam left her wandering the streets of Montreal feeling empty instead of elated, she decided teaching was really what she wanted to do. She was accepted into the education program at McGill where she completed a two-year degree. And the rest is history. I have spoken to Thuy a few times in the past about her teaching (sometimes on nice walks around the campus), and was really looking forward to sharing some of her insights with others.
Thuy started out teaching introductory biology courses, then began teaching anatomy and physiology (A&P) to first-year nursing students. After 15 years of teaching A&P, an opportunity came up for her to teach the infectious disease course. At first, Thuy was not interested, but as she thought about it (and became fascinated with sourdough cultures) she decided to give it a try, and in Fall of 2019 found herself teaching three new courses, one being the infectious disease course. “I remember teaching my infectious disease students that first fall, talking about Ebola and other diseases where the World Health Organization will come in to mitigate spread of the disease during an outbreak. To help students understand the challenges of public health and relate to the people living through the Ebola outbreak, I said ‘can you imagine if you got sick, and people in blue vests came and said, you can’t get together with your family this Christmas because you have a respiratory illness?’ And then, COVID happened. Teaching this course turned out to be a good thing for me, because despite the horror of switching to online teaching, because I was still new to infectious disease, I found myself very curious about COVID rather than worn down by it.”
I asked Thuy what she likes best about her life as an instructor. “I really like the creative aspect of it and the problem solving and I like learning and trying new things, whether it’s new material or new students with new problems. I find the challenges of, for example, making a particular piece of content more accessible or easier to understand, fun. And the best challenges are when students come for help, you work with them, and then see them achieve what they want – that’s really exciting. But I do find it hard when students are struggling but you have no idea if it’s a personal struggle, a content-related struggle, or a learning skills struggle – sometimes it can be difficult to support in those circumstances.”
Going back to her online teaching experience (which she found especially challenging) during COVID, I asked Thuy if there were things she continued to integrate into her teaching since coming back to in-person teaching. “I have continued to record my lectures and make them available to students, and I provide notes for them in D2L, first, to reduce stress for people who can’t make it because of illness and also to support international students, or for any student really. For example, while my dental hygiene students come to every class, most of them watch the recordings in case they missed something. Some students don’t take notes in class anymore because they find it more effective to focus and listen and not have to worry about taking notes too.”
I wondered if Thuy had any memories of past 25 years of teaching that stuck out for her. “There were two students – I don’t remember their names, but I still think about them sometimes. Both of them came to me for help and I spent a lot of time with them. When they came to my office, I would ask them about various topics, and they could talk to me about those topics with no problem. However, when it came to writing the exams, they would falter. I began to feel that oral exams would have worked better for them., but at that time I didn’t know how to go about offering oral exams as an option in a way that would have seemed fair and not additionally stressful for them. Maybe if I had tried it, or if I had been able to talk to somebody who had already tried it I could have helped these students more.”
I asked Thuy what advice she might have for new instructors at Camosun. “It doesn’t matter if you’re new or if you’ve been teaching for a while, sometimes things don’t go well, and you can lose confidence. One image which helps me when I feel really, really low, is that what I am doing is scrunching down low so that I can suddenly leap up – that periods of downs are actually periods of powering up. Thinking about them that way can really help. In addition, so often when we as teachers get evaluations, 95% of them will be great, but those other one or two comments are the ones that hurt you, that stick with you. But don’t hold those negative comments to your heart.” Thuy said she thought this same idea would be helpful for students as well. “One bad exam can be demotivating enough to make students give up. Instead, we need to all remember to use those failures as feedback. Everyone fails at one time or another and it’s not the failing that’s important, it’s what you do afterwards that matters.”
As we wrapped up our conversation, Thuy wanted to share one more story with me. “To support students to develop their voice, I ask them to do presentations, but not in front of the entire class. Instead, they present to small groups of people at stations in the classroom. As students in the audience move from station to station, the presenting students repeat the same ten-minute presentation many times, so they become more comfortable with presenting. My dental hygiene students do this twice in one semester and once in the following semester, and by the end they have learned how to narrow down what is important, how to create visuals for the presentation, how to engage their audience and are better prepared for their capstone project, a presentation in front of 30 dentists and dental health professionals!” What a wonderful model for building an essential, transferable skill in a supportive environment. I am looking forward to our next walk to find out what she is exploring next.