Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Tales of a Teacher: Robert Danisch

By Lisa Kabesh. This excerpt is the first of three Centre for Teaching Excellence Teaching Stories that will be featured in the Daily Bulletin this week.

When asked about the role experiential education plays in his classes,  quips, “I didn’t know there was another kind.” In the courses Robert Danisch teaches at Waterloo — Speech Writing, Small Group Communication, Persuasion, and Communication Ethics — practice is integral to student learning.

Danisch wryly summarizes how Humanities classes tend to work: read some stuff, talk about what was read, then write or talk about it in a more formal way. This, too, is the foundation of his classes, and Danisch establishes this expectation for his students early in his courses. To some outside of the Humanities, how experiential learning fits into this process might not be immediately evident. But as he tries to make clear to his students, everything is communication. Students are always “doing” communication in his classes, as they are in all of their classes.

Danisch seeks to make students aware of the ubiquity of communication and their role in it as active communicators. When he began teaching Small Group Communication at Waterloo in 2011, he brought to the course the unorthodox approach that he had employed when teaching a similar course at Concordia University: on the first day of class, he walked into the classroom and simply sat down. What happened next was up to the students. When Danisch paused the class some time later, he asked students to reflect on the toolkit of small group communication practices they had to resort to when his refusal to lead the discussion gave them no other option. The message was clear: we are all always practicing learned communication skills. Taking the time to reflect on those skills can help us to be more intentional about how we relate to and with others.

In this way, Danisch helps students develop as reflexive practitioners — as communicators capable of reflecting on their practices and making adjustments based on those reflections.

While daunting to some, this cycle of practice-feedback-reflection develops in learners not just a knowledge of theory, or what Danisch calls “know-that,” but an embodied knowledge embedded in practice, or “know-how.”

In his Speech Writing course, for example, students explore a rhetorical device like parallel structure (verbal elements or phrases that repeat to build rhythm, pattern, and meaning) in a speech that they write and deliver to the class. Students receive real-time feedback from Danisch and their peers; as he points out, this class is not for the faint-hearted. While daunting to some, this cycle of practice-feedback-reflection develops in learners not just a knowledge of theory, or what Danisch calls “know-that,” but an embodied knowledge embedded in practice, or “know-how.” It is this know-how that Danisch works to cultivate in students, and he attempts to do so by placing agency in the hands of learners.

Read the rest of the Teaching Story on the CTE website.

Optometry student’s research visible across Canada

By Peter Stirling. This article was originally published on the School of Optometry and Vision Science website.

If you are travelling by plane in Canada, or through the train and bus terminals of Ottawa, you may spot the University of Waterloo logo and recognize one of our School of Optometry & Vision Science’s graduate student celebrities, Emmanual Alabi, on billboards and posters created by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). Alabi was chosen as one of eight researchers from across Canada who exemplify a curious, ambitious, innovative and collaborative approach to their work. Promoted under the #IAmInnovation hashtag, CFI also created a video to highlight Alabi’s research.

In 2017, Alabi received recognition after winning the University of Waterloo Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. Alabi’s research focuses on the observation of pupil response and blood flow as factors to measure an individual’s pain tolerance when stimuli are introduced to the surface of the eye. By characterizing these responses, Alabi and his colleagues hope to develop objective metrics to quantify how we experience pain.

Alabi attributes his passion for his current research to the support of his supervisor, Professor Trefford Simpson, who has been studying human ocular surface sensory processing for over twenty years now. Sponsored largely through funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Simpson and his team of researchers are studying the sensory spectrum of the surface of the eye.

Beyond Alabi's research on the local effect of pain to the eye, another of Simpson’s students, Varadhu Jayakumar, is considering how stimuli affects the way we cognitively accommodate that sensation. What influence does a psychological response such as anxiety have on our experience of mildly painful or cold stimuli? And beyond how we interpret the sensation, does the language we use capture the feeling?

“Very few people are working on the basic sensory mechanisms of how our eye feels, and what enables that feeling. We still know so little, and there are many opportunities for new directions. It is immensely satisfying to work with graduate students whose experiments are opening new windows to our understanding of the complexity of the sensory process.”

Alabi and Simpson were in Ottawa on February 12 to discuss their research with Members of Parliament, Senators, and representatives from NSERC/SSHRC.

If you happen to snap a selfie with a CFI billboard of Alabi, please tag us! @UwOptometry @InnovationCA #IAmInnovation