News Releases
Candice Viddal reflects on teaching, curiosity, and the beauty of science
Candice Viddal, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, is a co-recipient of the 2023 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award.
Dr. Candice Viddal, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, has worked at CMU since 2010. She and Dr. Jodi Dueck-Read, Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution Studies and Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies, are co-recipients of the 2023 Kay and Lorne Dick Teaching Excellence Award.
The award, established in 2022, is granted annually to two faculty members who best exemplify the CMU commitment to excellent teaching.
How would you describe your teaching philosophy? How has it evolved over the years?
In my teaching, my aim is to first and foremost be dedicated to the discipline so that I can be effective as an instructor and enthusiastic with the students. I also structure my courses with the belief that students are inherently capable of becoming independent learners and that they're well positioned to be successful if they come with an open mind and are ready to put in the appropriate amount of work, using the tools I provide them. Science as a discipline is really about learning to pay close attention to patterns in nature, and I find emphasizing that to be very valuable in the classroom. I aim to create an environment that invites students to ask questions, explore their curiosities, and build their problem-solving skills.
How do you balance academic rigour with making learning enjoyable for your students?
I do think that academic rigour and learning go hand-in-hand for the most part, and many students do come to university because they're looking for rigour. Science is, by its nature, quite rigorous and it is because of that that it's such a useful tool for learning about the world. It's very systematic and very careful, and I believe students are better served when their learning in the classroom reflects the nature of the discipline. But one of my ways of dealing with rigour is to break the course down into small pieces so that I can emphasize the key ideas and show students that if they're confronted with a physics problem and it looks difficult, they can usually solve it if they focus on and learn those key principles. Then once they get to that "aha" moment where they're like, "Oh that's what that means," then the insight they gained will actually stay with them. Another thing I like to do is talk a lot about how the ideas in science have quite wide applicability. Many of our students have no plans to become scientists themselves, but they can develop a greater appreciation of how that knowledge might be relevant to their own lives, or their careers, or even just society in general.
What techniques or tactics do you use to keep students motivated?
I always try to display my own enthusiasm about the content because I do believe that students can be motivated when they see their instructor being so invested in their material. That's how it was when I was a student, so I always try to convey that as well. But on a practical side, I give students weekly assignments for marks so they can develop those strong habits for learning. It is a lot of work, but I think it's really important for them to build their skills incrementally. It's very easy to get lost and fall behind in technical fields if you're not constantly working at it, so giving them that weekly goal helps them build those skills. When they do find they can solve those problems, they're more motivated to keep going and to keep building on that skill set. I also like to give students opportunities to have discussions in small groups. Students often find, "I'm glad to hear my peers are having the same difficulty with this idea as I am." Then they can talk to each other, clarify their thinking, and I really think that helps them stay motivated.
What impact do you hope to leave on your students?
I hope that students will feel empowered by the work they've done in the courses I teach, to continue with their academic journey in confidence, and that they will feel like the skills they learned are really valuable with respect to their career goals. I also hope that students continue to use scientific thinking wherever it's possible in their own lives. Of course, science isn't applicable in every area of our life; but it is a tool that can help us make decisions about certain things and play a role in developing wisdom in relating to our world; taking into account the actual knowledge we have about nature. Beyond that, one of my hopes is that students will also find beauty in science. To me, science is just an endless source of beauty, like a work of art, and it really enriches our minds regardless of our career paths.
What strategies do you use to engage and inspire your students?
For me, teaching is about arousing curiosity. I think about science as about solving puzzles; using our observations about nature and piecing them together in order to find some kind of an explanation or link that will join two different things that on the surface look completely different. What I do to instill this in my students is to start by using puzzles or a question that confronted scientists in the past and then show them how those very questions stimulated the creation of a scientific idea and why it's useful. By doing it that way, I always hope I'm making the subject look a lot less distant and mysterious. You have these large textbooks that are just loaded with information, but there's a lot of stuff in there that we're not actually talking about, like what brought us here? I find those are the pieces that get students to see these are other humans that are asking questions about nature and trying to work things out for themselves.
Print This Article