Dr. Mayi Arcellana-Panlilio, PhD

I mentor undergraduate student team research in synthetic biology addressing real-world problems, such as development of a detection system for pathogenic bacterial sequences in meat undertaken by the University of Calgary 2013 iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machines) team.

Projects:

Integrating Peer Mentoring into an Undergraduate Cell Biology Course

Peer mentoring can be seen as a manifestation of the construct of “students as partners” which is one of the key pillars in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Peer mentoring is defined as a collaborative process where a senior student, in collaboration with the instructor for the course, will be introducing interventions to improve student learning. This has been shown to have significant benefits for both professors and peer mentors, alongside the impact on mentees. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of students’ experiences in undergraduate classrooms, specifically in an Honors Cell and Molecular Biology course (MDSC 351) at the University of Calgary as a result of peer mentor led interventions. 

This project was presented at ISSOTL Connect 2021 (https://youtu.be/Yxuy-hkB314) and in a poster at the ISSOTL 2021 Conference.

ISSOTL 2021 Poster presentation

Reimagining our relationships with SoTL: Applying the T-shaped model

Amongst a range of changes that have taken place within tertiary education, perhaps the most revolutionary has been a shift to student-centred approaches focused on life-long learning. Accompanying this approach to holistic Higher Education (HE) has been a growing interest in, and understanding of, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). 

The T-shaped person, and more recently the T-shaped community, is being operationalised in HE to inform and connect the development of students’ deep disciplinary knowledge with non-academic and career readiness skills (such as communication, problem-solving, teamwork and critical thinking). The T-shaped community further seeks to address questions around holistic development of our students and enabling them to flourish beyond the confines of the HE environments and discipline. Importantly, we argue for a re-positioning of SoTL to complement and support this model, with SoTL as both the fulcrum and the fluid multiple threads of discourse that are intricately entwined around the structure of the T-shaped model (Eady et al., 2021).

Here, all stakeholders within HE connect both their academic knowledge and holistic skills in collaborative ways to produce learners who flourish in modern society. The SoTL community plays a pivotal role in achieving this vision and is well-positioned to expand the current notion of SoTL towards a more holistic, interconnected, central role in HE. This study provides opportunities for participants to consider how the application of the T-shaped model could potentially influence their understanding and conceptualisation of SoTL.

Theoretical paper on model for scholarship of teaching and learning

Using an Active Learning Approach in a Lesson on Genetic Regulation

Undergraduate students in biological and health sciences must learn about how gene activity is regulated by elements in the cell environment. The biological components have multiple interacting elements and function in complex ways. In a classroom setting, static images or videos are typically used to convey these biological representations, however static images fail to convey dynamic interactions and videos can become difficult to follow because of the limitations of working memory. To address this, we are designing, what we call, an interactive-visual lesson with paper cut-out pieces to promote an active learning approach to teaching regulation in genetics. Furthermore, we would like to develop a lesson that can be easily adopted by other teaching professionals. To do this we plan to address the main reasons instructors do not adopt evidence-based active learning strategies in the classroom. We would like to develop a lesson that can be taught in a short timeframe so as not to take away from class time needed to cover important content. Although we would like to optimize the lesson to decrease the time needed to teach it, while will also consider and mitigating the impact this may have on student learning.