Teaching Philosophy

At the core of my choice to become a teacher is my commitment to equity for all people, particularly those already done disservice by the current system of power and structurally oppressed by its design and use. Growing up as a Filipino immigrant in the US, I understand the struggles of moving and adapting to a new country with a new language, new culture, new way of living. Students that don’t come from a background that’s either rich, white, English-first-language or educated lack the privilege granted by these identities and often have a distinctly harder time feeling involved in the classroom, feeling relevant to the material being taught and feeling that they are worthy of a high standard of education. Not only is the classroom difficult to navigate, but on top of that, students have to learn how to create and maintain interpersonal relationships while balancing family life and school life. Coming from a culture vastly different from an American one, navigating the alien environment and the subtle forms of non-verbal communication can be challenging, if not impossible, to those that lack the proper support from their parents, educators and friends.

My philosophy in teaching science can be summarized in the words of Carl Sagan’s last interview, “Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking.” In a world rife with such a great body of information at the touch of our fingertips, it is an important skill in any field of study, particularly in science, to distinguish the difference between correct information and misinformation. My students will first and foremost be learning how to think like real world scientists; even if they may not necessarily go into a scientific field after my class, as citizens in this world, I want them to be informed about their world and especially about how science, engineering and technology influences their daily lives.

Science in the real world is greater than just learning the content knowledge required in, let’s say biology. While the core concepts about DNA, cells and energy are an important aspect of being proficient in the biological sciences, it is not as important to fully memorize the Calvin cycle’s precursors and products, so much as it is to know why the Calvin cycle is important in the broader understanding of photosynthesis and learning about the common patterns and themes in biochemistry cycles like the Calvin cycle, Krebs cycle, etc. One of the common experiences I’ve had as a student in K-12 education is being taught content material by my teacher but also not understanding how the isolated facts that I’ve learned can piece together to create a broader, bigger picture of science. The key to preventing this from occurring in my class is by making sure that students have a story of science and scientific content throughout the semester, almost like telling a story of how knowing how one facet of science can lead to questioning another part of science.

One big challenge of science teaching is knowing how to get students engaged in learning about science content. While it is worthwhile for students to understand that science is useful in every day applications in life, it can be easier to use a real life, in person example of a science concept to draw them into a lesson than just talking about how it can help them in the future abstract.

One way to address this is by using discrepant events or observant of natural science phenomenon. A discrepant event can be used during a classroom lesson to demonstrate thought-provoking phenomena in science that runs counter to the assumed knowledge that we have rationalized in our daily lives, where using this demonstration can effectively combat misconceptions about how the natural world functions and how thinking with science can help us propose mechanisms to explain what supposedly runs counter to our common sense. One of the most common discrepant events are about vision or color, and how illusions can be created by exploiting how our sight works with our brain to assume certain features that we observe. It can go to show that even what we observe with our senses can display a false sense of a situation, if not properly analyzed and justified though science thinking.

Science thinking and science content are not the only important parts of teaching/learning science; teachers and students also have to take scientific literacy into account. It is an important skill to glean the proper information from a science article, be it a research abstract or popular science article, and understand what kinds of assumptions are made in the writing along with whether its claims are justified, valid and the extent to which they are.

In science, I want to give more students the tools they need to succeed post-secondary education if they wish to attain it. This means not only giving students a better understanding of the core concepts and ideas in the sciences, but also cultivating the mode of thinking that scientists require to creatively design research, conduct experiments, and communicate with each other about their thoughts on recent breakthroughs and their work. Science, I’ve learned, requires more than memorizing or simply analyzing the information that teachers or professors present; it requires being able to grasp the technical language and concepts needed to communicate to others your discovery and how it relates to the current paradigm in the scientific field. Without the proper content knowledge and technical language, it is difficult to find the right vocabulary to speak in depth about a scientific subject; yet, without proper communication skills and writing skills, even if you’ve mastered the content knowledge and language very well, failing to communicate ideas to other scientists or other people, makes the knowledge inaccessible and unable to be properly utilized by others to build upon their understanding. For scientists, they stand upon the shoulders of giants, building on past information and correcting current views about the world we live in to create amazing inventions that can address the societal needs that a community requires.