Dr Rebecca Bird.
Award-winning anatomy teacher, Dr Rebecca Bird would like more people to choose science as a career path.
Bird recently received a Sustained Excellence award in the national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards.
A Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anatomy, she teaches into the HUBS papers that are part of the Health Sciences First Year programme and some of the second year Anatomy science papers.
As such, she interacts with hundreds of students each year who want to be doctors or dentists or physiotherapists.
“We need these professionals and of course they're important”, she says, “but we also need scientists who are going to change the world by discovering new things.
“We need more curious and enthusiastic scientists and I hope I inspire some of my students to go down that path”.
A fundamental step towards inspiring her students is helping them to feel comfortable in the classroom.
Some students, for example, can be uncomfortable talking about body parts and human reproduction, particularly when they have experienced barriers around these topics.
With this in mind, Bird sets out to foster an environment where students can ask questions without being judged and where they feel safe and included.
“I pride myself in creating a fun, inclusive environment for my students as they study science. I see education as a journey, and am privileged to walk alongside them as they discover areas of human biology that interest and inspire them.
“If they have a good experience with me I hope it will help them think about what they are capable of doing and that it might set them on a path of something great”.
Bird didn't always want to teach but when she was doing her PhD at the University of Glasgow she found that going into the labs with students was more rewarding than the time spent conducting her own experiments. This discovery led her to apply for a Teaching Fellow position at the University of Otago.
Now she loves what she is doing and is driven by the “light bulb moments”.
“There's something about having that interaction with a student, either one-on-one or in a big class, when they're confused about something and then it just 'clicks' in their head and you can see it suddenly makes sense to them.
“It's incredibly satisfying to be part of that moment, knowing that you had some role in making those puzzle pieces fit together”.
She also enjoys being able to help alleviate some stress from students, particularly those who will be applying for professional programmes, by setting very clear expectations.
“I can't take away the content because it's what they need to know but I can tell them what I expect of them and make it clear what they'll be examined on”.
Another satisfaction comes from tutoring students through Te Huka Mātauraka Māori Centre and she is keen to integrate more Te Reo into her teaching. To this end she is enrolled in the He Papa Tikanga course, which is a certificate in Tikanga, from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.
Her love of teaching and her desire to keep educating herself have helped to steer Bird towards a recently completed Master of Higher Education through HEDC at the University of Otago.
This, in turn, has opened up a new avenue of education research to her and has led to a secondment into a part-time role focused on improving students' experiences at university. This will mean stepping back from some of her teaching in the Department of Anatomy but she is excited at the prospect of continuing to make a positive contribution to the university community and to students in particular.
Related links
- Department of Anatomy
- Health Sciences First Year
- HUBS 191 Human Body Systems 1
- HUBS 192 Human Body Systems 2