Igniting our Practice

For this session, we asked two inspirational University of Waterloo professors, Kelly Anthony, and Hamid Jahed, to draw us into their disciplines and into the learning spaces they create for their students by teaching us a concept from their own courses.  The methods they use are diverse, but the intention underlying them is the same: to engage students in thinking about important disciplinary concepts and questions.  After each presenter takes us into his or her learning space, we’ll have the opportunity to reflect on and discuss the ways in which these methods might be adapted in our own fields and within our own classrooms.

Kelly Anthony is a lecturer in Applied Health Sciences in the School of Public Health and Health Systems; she is also AHS’s first Teaching Fellow. Kelly loves her work both as an instructor and being asked to help ‘raise the profile of teaching’ by supporting and encouraging teaching excellence in AHS and across campus. Last year, Kelly won the Distinguished Teacher Award.

Kelly has taught dozens of classes over her 17 year teaching career in the areas of psychology, scientific methods, communications, and public health at several universities here and in the US. Her current courses focus on social justice and public health and she is passionate about teaching strategies that really engage, challenge, and awaken students, especially those that involve experiential learning in the community or with members of the community.  In this session, Kelly will address the following questions: What exactly are the boundaries of the modern university classroom?  How can we see the community as a teaching tool that benefits both our students and our world?  She will share with us how a discussion about childhood experiences can come to life by ‘co-teaching’ the topic with youth from foster care.

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Hamid Jahed is a professor, and the associate chair of graduate studies in the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Department. Teaching is of great value to him, and at times, he prioritizes teaching over research as he believes while there is a lower chance for our research breakthroughs to directly impact our society, by teaching, we all get a share in training the future leaders who can perhaps change the word. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the University of Waterloo and the Sandford Fleming Foundation Teaching Excellence Awards in 2010.

An undergraduate course that he teaches each year to the second year mechatronics engineering students is Mechanics of Deformable Solids (MODS), an introductory course to the behaviour of structures under load. Like any other subject, introducing the building-block concepts to a large young audience and assuring that the idea has gone across, is very challenging.  Over the past decade, Hamid has developed a few hands-on activities and in-class demonstrations to encourage critical thinking, and to engage students with in-class learning.  Hamid will take us into the “structural stability” concept through some simple in-class demonstrations.