THE FIRST OAKTON CONFERENCE FOR TEACHING EXCELLENCE CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS     TEACHING, SCHOLARSHIP, AND HOMEOSTASIS Terry Trobec, Professor of Biology

Good morning and welcome to the first Oakton conference on Teaching Excellence. Logically, I’m the first keynote speaker for this conference and this is my first keynote speech. I thought that I might get some direction on my responsibilities as a keynote speaker by looking up the term "keynote speech". I think you’ll be surprised as I was to find out that the term comes from two words from the old Slovene language, which happens to be my own ethnic heritage. The words are "koyoshic*" and "notechka*" which have their application in ancient theatre. I don’t speak Slovenian but our reference librarians were able to obtain an ancient copy of a Slovene-English dictionary. The words literally mean "is lowly warm-up act for big shot stars that follow.^*" (*These are made-up words and meaning.)

At this time of year, many of us have had experience with the following writing assignment. “What did you do on your summer vacation?” I’m going to do a variation on that assignment. Like many of my colleagues, I taught over the summer session: I taught BIO 101 Introduction to Life Science, a 4 credit hour lab and lecture course meeting three hours a day from 8:00 A.M. till 10:50 A.M., 4 days a week, for 8 weeks. The course is designed to be a general education requirement filler for the natural sciences and is also required of many students wanting to enter our health career programs. Since it is an 8-week course, it and a hand full of other courses, began a week before the main 7-week summer session. Along with handing out and going over the syllabus on the first day, I also handout a student information sheet on which I ask the students to write a paragraph on what kind of student they are, giving me both strengths and weaknesses and suggesting ways I could help them be successful in the course. I ask them to write a second paragraph on what type of preparation they thought they needed for their future careers. More importantly for my story, I ask them how many classes/credit hours they were taking and how many hours they were working each week. As has been the case in previous summers, there were a majority of students taking additional courses (as many as 13 credit hours total) and working 30 to 40 hours a week. So the next Monday, the beginning of the 7-week session when their other classes were going to start, I admonished them to keep on top of their class performance each day so if necessary they could get extra help or drop a course if they started to falter. As the summer progressed, I started to see dark circles developing under some students’ eyes. Others caught colds that lingered. And yet others seemed to have lost the will to live, and I could tell this because they stopped laughing at my jokes.

On the Thursday at the end of the seventh week of the course, I was beginning another of my scintillating lectures, with the room partially darkened so that I could project a diagram of the renal nephron, the functional unit of the kidney; one million of these microscopic structures are found in each of our kidneys. As I turned to point out the proximal convoluted tubule of the nephron, out of the corner of my eye I saw a student neatly fold his hands in front of him and start to lower his head towards the desk top. Ah Ah AHHH! The syllabus says in your seat, on time and Raring to take careful , thorough, detailed notes. He said to me “Don’t take this personally. I had to work overtime yesterday and I’m just tired.” Hmmm..don’t take it personally? “ Class,..Class…How many of you think I like biology?” At first they thought I was playing one of my weird games with them but then they slowly started to raise their hands until all hands were up. “ Now put your hands down. How many of you think I LOVE biology?” This time they all quickly raised their hands. “You’re right! The love for biology is a fundamental part of who I am. It began as a legacy to my sister and I from our parents who in our isolated woodland home at hearing the song of a Baltimore oriole would send us into the house to cut up oranges to put on the windowsill to keep the orioles around, or would delight at seeing drifts of white trilliums and dog toothed violets in the spring. Like most people who have lived for more than a few years, I’ve experienced good times and bad times, and even during the bad times, my love of nature has given me peace and hope and even things to laugh at.” Of course you can’t blame our students because all too often their experience from middle school and even high school has been that they had teachers that did not get the choice to teach in their specialties. A couple of years ago I heard a statistic that only 23% of high school physics teachers either majored or minored in physics. Some of our students know about this because they were directly told by their teachers, others have guessed this because their teachers seemed to dislike the subjects they were teaching as much as the students did. I wonder if our students think that during this orientation week that we instructors were drawing the courses that we are going to teach out of a hat. “Oh no I got biology. What do I know about anthropology?” Or the one that everyone dreads “English Lit AHHHHH!” “So class let me give you some insight. Your instructors love what they teach. Yes Tingxiu actually loves math. Holly loves philosophy, Maurice loves chemistry, Peg loves Shakespeare , Maureen loves chocolate first, but then Irish literature, and I love biology. It’s the best.” Now Fred, the student who was going to sneak a nap, worked as a mechanic and I would imagine a good one because he was bright and asked great questions when he was awake. So I said to Fred, “Imagine you’re at a party and one of your best friends comes up to you and says ‘what’s up’ and you have just completed a training course on a new fuel injection system and you enthusiastically start to tell him about it. You notice though that after just two seconds your friend starts to shift his eyes looking over your shoulder and then back to the other side. You stop talking and a minute goes by before your friend notices. Do you take that personally?” Fred said “I see your point”. I asked him “How would you like your friend to behave?” “I would like him to pay attention to what I said.” “What would be even better?” “I’d like him to be enthusiastic and excited about what I said” “And how would you know that?” “Well, he’d ask me questions and start to participate in the conversation.” “Yes, and as teachers who love what they teach, that’s what we’re trying to do with you. The best teaching is like a lively conversation with a good friend.”

“There is a concept that we studied in the first unit that parallels this thought and several good biological examples that model it. The concept is homeostasis; the maintenance of constancy within a living unit. Not constancy achieved by bringing things to a halt, but constancy achieved by a dynamic balance of activities. For instance when we studied the cell, what was the role of the nucleus? It was the brain or control center of the cell. What was the nature of the boundary around the nucleus? It had large pores or channels and in this way the nucleus could send chemical messages, orders, to other parts of the cell. But how would the nucleus know that its orders were being followed or what kind of external stimuli other parts of the cell were responding to? It needs to get feedback, the pores allow for communication in both directions and this is what allows for the dynamic balance or homeostasis. The same thing happens in our own bodies as we maintain body temperature. The temperature of our bodies is monitored in a portion of the brain called the hypothalamus. When our temperature drops below a certain point, the hypothalamus directs blood flow away from the extremities and increases body metabolism to keep our core body temperature from dropping too far. Conversely, when our temperature exceeds a certain level, the hypothalamus directs blood flow to the extremities to dump excess heat. For me though, the best analogy is that of ecosystem succession. Ecosystems can be simply divided into two parts; biotic, the living components; plants, animals, bacteria, and mushrooms, and abiotic, the nonliving support; sun, climate, and inorganic chemicals. An ecosystem begins with a minimum of abiotic constituents, just enough light, moisture, and chemicals so that the seeds of certain pioneer plants can germinate and start to grow. The plants attract animals. The animals leave behind their droppings and sometimes their carcasses and the plants die back each year. All of this adds organic material, increases water holding capacity, and adds stability to the soil; in essence changing the abiotic environment. The plants themselves create microclimates with less sunlight and lower temperatures because of their shade. These abiotic changes allow for new plants to germinate and a new host of animals that are attracted and can be supported. The biotic components of the ecosystem slowly change the presence and abundance of the abiotic components and the altered abotic components then change conditions that allow for a new biotic community. This dynamic interaction creates a slowly evolving balance point that shifts in a progressive manner so that more kinds of life forms can be maintained with each change and the physical environment becomes equally complex.” Our interactions with our students enrich ourselves as well, hopefully, as our students, and as we continue these conversations the homeostatic balance point shifts to higher and more complex levels of inquiry.

 Of course whether teaching or conversing with a friend one does need to have something to say and not just love of the subject alone. We need to continue asking the questions that brought us to our respective disciplines. In my first years at Oakton, fresh out of graduate school, I longed for the research that I had left behind. In part, because my idea of what was necessary to conduct research was limited, as were the kinds of questions that I thought I could pursue, I did very little research. It was for the best because I needed to concentrate on learning how to be a teacher. Oakton provided much assistance to that end with workshops, seminars like the Critical Thinking Seminar conducted by Linda Jerit and Lorenz Bohem and the Teaching Technique Seminar led by Marilee McGowen and Bill Taylor both of whom are presenting this morning. Colleagues were willing to share their strategies, as well as funny and sometimes scary stories. The environment was ripe for tandems, troikas, and even larger course offerings and I had the good sense to listen to Steve Schada and Gene Carr with whom I developed some exciting course combinations. It was a heavy time commitment on our parts as well as for the students, but some of my best memories come from those classes. By talking with my colleagues, I sense that the atmosphere is charged for a resurgence of this teaching approach and is reinforced by the support outlined in our latest contract.

Almost twenty years ago, an adjunct faculty member, Karen Ramirez, read about and then encouraged me to join her in the Illinois EPA’s Volunteer Lake Monitoring Program. Twice a month from May through October we’d sample Oakton’s retention pond which is known as Lake Oakton to the IEPA. Today Dave Rodgers and I continue the monitoring which has been expanded to include some basic chemical analysis. The data we collect is complied by the IEPA along with data on close to 200 other lakes throughout the state and published each year. This data has allowed us to document the process of succession in our own retention pond. This work has helped me learn more about aquatic environments and given me a wonderful example to help students understand how water flowed over our campus before we developed it, and why the retention pond is now here and that it is part of a system of water holding areas and drains that reduce the severity of flooding along the Des Plaines River.

 I can’t thank Oakton’s Board of Trustees and Administration enough for approving Ken Schaffer’s position as campus naturalist and supporting the Restoration work taking place on campus. As Honors Program students along with Rinda West and I worked with Ken over the years, the students gained knowledge of diverse ecosystems and created their own legacy by restoring sections of ecosystems that they then pointed out to friends and relatives, and I was thankfully drawn into areas of biology that were not part of my initial training which was at a time when prairies were just thought to be weedy lots and not the reservoirs of biodiversity that they are known for today. More recently this has led me along with Carol Ward to first do frog monitoring and then butterfly monitoring for the Chicago Wilderness Society’s Project Habitat Program. Monitoring frogs was done at night and involved identification by hearing specific mating calls. It was fun sneaking around the locked-up forest preserve in the dark when no one was around and almost stumbling over the dear. The butterfly work was done during mid-day hours on sunny not too breezy days. Thank goodness we didn’t carry video cameras because you can probably imagine what I must look like trying to run down and net a fast, sleek, maneuverable butterfly. Yet now everywhere I go I hear frogs and see butterflies, and I can even identify some.

This fall I will be joining Kristy Shanahan, Mark Walter, Carol Ward, and Tom Firak in a course offering that these four developed with the support of the Faculty Fellows Program. The course provides an undergraduate research experience in biology and chemistry that integrates the teaching styles and research experience of these faculty as they shepherd students trying to solve questions that cross several disciplines. In the process of presenting this course, the faculty members have connected students to external sources so that those studying cystic fibrosis have a connection with a researcher at Northwestern who is an expert in the field, those studying protein chemistry are linked to researchers at Argonne National labs, and a new research topic for this fall involving symbiotic relationships among soil microorganisms and the health of restored ecosystems links us to an expert who is conducting her research at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. You can learn more about this endeavor by attending presentations later this morning.

Another thing that I associate with this time of year is a new beginning; new students with fresh ideas, new information to add to my courses, new teaching strategies to try, and a continuing hunger to learn how I might do a better job. Our presenters this morning will give us their thoughts on questions that have driven them. How do we know that we are in a conversation or an effective and engaging one? Are we designing assessments that stimulate learning or stifle it? Are we creating environments that support student discovery? Do we model the type of behavior that we think will make our students adaptable and successful? How might technology be used to reach those that are not engaged and extend the reach of those with different learning styles or goals? Are we as an institution doing what we want to do and say that we do? This is a lot to be excited about, and now I’m raring to take careful, thorough, detailed notes, so bring on the Stars!