UW-Madison
Professor, Dairy Systems Management
Affiliate Faculty, The Nelson Institute
Wisconsin Teaching Fellow, 2001
Wisconsin Teaching Scholars, 2009
In writing this essay I hope to share with you, dear readers, the central role that the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has played in my professional growth and development as a member of the University of Wisconsin, an institution that prides itself for promoting the continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found. The quote that defines who we are as members of the University of Wisconsin was revealed to me during my doctoral degree in Dairy Sciences on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in the 1980s, but its relevance to the instructional mission of our university was not made clear to me until I participated in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows program (WTFP) and later the Wisconsin Teaching Scholars program (WTSP).
Before going any further, I would like to beg your pardon for subjecting you to a first-person narrative. Although authors were prompted to use this genre to develop an engaging storyline, centering the essay on the “I, me and mine” seems counterproductive at best and an oxymoron at worst. After all, isn’t the deemphasis of the “I, me and mine” from our traditional teaching and learning environment in favor of more participatory activities one of main paradigm shifts we strive for in the college classroom?
To be sure, SoTL practitioners are cornerstone players in our quest to make our college classrooms more impactful and effective. When I first started to teach semester-long courses, it didn’t take long for my students to teach me that their learning didn’t occur because of my disciplinary expertise (in this instance my knowledge of Dairy Science). Thankfully, it also didn’t take long either for SoTL to teach me that learning is a process that is mediated through a series of interactions centered on the students. In other words, learning doesn’t occur in a vacuum but is shaped by numerous interactions. Thus, it was early in my SoTL journey that I became aware that one of my roles as an instructor was to create a “learning architecture” that fostered impactful and effective student interactions with me, with each other, with course content, and with instructional technology, just to name a few. There are no doubts that the young adults from diverse backgrounds who happened to take my courses played a central role in shaping my identity as an educator. My students motivated me, puzzled me, and challenged my instructional practices. They taught me to set clear and relevant standards, and they made me ask questions and search for answers. Furthermore, the culture of my institution, and my interactions with colleagues, friends, and even family members have impacted my enduring journey to become a more effective instructor. To borrow a popular metaphor about raising a child, I would argue that it takes a village to raise an accomplished college instructor.
My passion to teach has been rooted in my passion to learn. Looking back at my career trajectory, engaging in SoTL was almost unavoidable and I am grateful that the WTF and WTS programs were part of the journey that shaped my instructional practices and worldviews on education. To start, I am taking you back to the fall of 2000. It had been a few months since I had accepted a job offer as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dairy Science in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The letter of offer was unusual as it indicated that: “We expect you to change the way our students learn Dairy Science”, and “for tenure you will be evaluated primarily on your excellence in teaching and secondarily on significant accomplishments in [Dairy Science] research.” Achieving tenure at the UW-Madison for being other than a star researcher was, and still is, practically unheard of. Thus, the path to tenure was unclear. Puzzlement was the most common facial expression I detected when seeking advice from well-intentioned senior colleagues. Teach a lot, get good course evaluations from your students, or author a textbook on dairy nutrition (my disciplinary expertise); all of that would surely look good in a tenure package, but would it be sufficient to cross the finish line?
Fast forward to 2006, and my SoTL work played no small part in the majority votes that honored me with tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor. The stars had aligned. Not only did my tenure package document a heavy teaching load, the creation of numerous new courses relying on various methods to engage students in active learning, good course evaluations, and online materials used by instructors at peer institutions, but more importantly it also documented the fulfilment of key criteria most often associated with excellence in research, namely, extra-mural funding (in teaching) and peer-reviewed publications (in teaching). In retrospect, the divisional committee that evaluated my tenure package was essentially expecting “SoTL” as much as “excellence in teaching.” A paper by Caroline Kreber published in 2002 had clarified for me that excellence in teaching had a lot to do with what happens between me and my students in the confine of our classroom, but SoTL could be assessed based on contributions to a body of pedagogical literature and impacts on a community of peer instructors (see Kreber, Caroline. 2002. Teaching excellence, teaching expertise, and the scholarship of teaching. Innovative Higher Education 27(1):5-23). In other words, excellence in teaching requires one set of skills, while SoTL requires another. These skill sets are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but both are grounded in the passion to explore ever more deeply the art and science of teaching and learning.
The proposal that I had submitted in my application to become the UW-Madison delegate to the 2002 WTF program was titled “Assessment techniques of students’ learning gains.” At the time, my interests focused on adopting new teaching methods (beyond power point lecture presentations) to engage my students into Bloom’s higher levels of learning and measure their learning gains subsequently. This project was part of my early attempts to become a SoTL practitioner and it contributed to a practice that I adopted shortly after participating in the program and continued to use throughout my career of conducting student surveys throughout the semester to assess the effectiveness of the learning environment “in real time.” Thus, the WTF program was foundational in my ability to formulate research questions, collect data systematically, and eventually publish results of “my research in my teaching.”
Was this what “student-centered” instruction really meant? It was upon further reflection on this experience and other somewhat similar experiences later in my career that I developed a teaching philosophy and course syllabi that disentangle my roles as an instructor and the roles of my students as learners. To put it simply I make it clear starting on the first day of class that I, as the instructor, “do the teaching” and my students, as the learners, “do the learning” with the former referring to me creating a learning space and the latter referring to my students engaging mindfully in that space. Upon hearing these words, the puzzlement on some of the students’ faces has sometimes been replaced by a cautious smile and gentle nod when I further explain that in my courses the teaching is not as much about lecturing as it is about empowering.
As importantly, however, I remember the profound impact of Faculty College, the four-day retreat-like event that took place on the (now defunct) UW-Richland Center campus in June and the follow-up event at the Pyle Center on the UW-Madison campus in November of that year. To this day, I have preciously guarded on my bookshelves the workshop materials, and in my heart the sense of belonging that I felt as I discovered a community of like-minded Wisconsin educators dedicated to improving their craft for the main goal of improving the lives of their students. It was during one of the optional evening activities that something special happened. The fascination I experienced looking for the first (and only) time of my live through a telescope that had been set up by a WTF program participant and passionate astronomer for his fellow educators to gaze the night sky was revealing to me. Seeing stars zooming through the lenses with my own eyes was amazing, but the explanation that the speed with which these points of light crossed my field of vision was a proxy for the speed of the earth traveling in space created a sense of awe in me. I didn’t know anything about astronomy, but this “simple” learning experience had an unexpected profound impact. I had just experienced something I wished I could replicate in my own classrooms. Upon reflection, knowingly or unknowingly, my WTF astronomer colleague had engaged me in an immersive experiential learning opportunity. In a brief period of time, I had experienced, reflected, conceptualized and experimented. I had plunged in a learning opportunity all together cognitively, affectively and physically. In other words, I had just experienced a full mind-and-body astronomy lesson.
The Wisconsin Teaching Scholars program that I had the honor to attend in 2009 was another milestone in my journey toward integrating the science with the art of teaching and learning in a college classroom. if research in the natural sciences and the social sciences do share some similarities, they also have contrasting features. Learning and applying the scientific method to discover new knowledge in nutritional physiology of dairy cattle had been the essence of a five-year PhD program. As a novice researcher, there was a “learning curve” to master the process of scientific discovery. It was only with repeated practices that I learned how to set researchable objectives, to select adequate experimental designs, sampling methods and frequencies, and to collect, store and process samples properly to obtain reliable and valid data. At that time, the mentors, instructors, and consultants who contributed to my growth and development as a scientist were the true giants on whose shoulders I stood. However, as my passion for SoTL grew in my early years as a professor, mentors were hard to find and I quickly realized that the approaches, the norms, the habits of minds of how to conceptualize, design and implement a research study that qualify as a SoTL project was distinct if not sometimes at odds with what I held as the “gold standards” of research in my discipline. Thus, when it comes to developing my SoTL knowledge and skills, the WTS program was one of my most substantive “crash courses” in the social sciences and educational psychology. Learning how to implement assessment techniques and conduct qualitative research (e.g., survey design, focus group) provided me with a degree of confidence in my ability to inquire systematically into specific aspects of my courses. Thankfully, the program allowed me to engage successfully in generating not necessarily “universal truths”, but nevertheless “a truth.” In other words, each SoTL project pushed the boundaries of my own understanding of what “truly” happened un my courses. The deep and meaningful insights that I have gained through analyzing the data and writing the manuscripts have been just as rewarding as publishing the findings in a peer-reviewed journal. My overall scientific expertise expanded accordingly, and I became a better overall scientist as a result.
In closing, suffice it to say that the roles that the WTF and the WTS programs played in my SoTL journey were extremely rewarding and empowering. As one last example of a ripple effects of the programs, it should be noted that it was not without the lessons learned from applying the knowledge and ideas that I was exposed to during these programs in my own teaching that I gained the confidence, expertise and credentials to create and implement successfully a course that has been offered for the last ten years on “Effective Teaching in Internationally Diverse College Classrooms” for PhD candidates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. I would like to express my deep gratitude for the opportunities that were given to me as a participant in the WTF and the WTS programs. In both instances, the experience was not only uplifting and energizing but also refreshing and humbling. Learning about teaching and learning from my passionate Wisconsin peer educators has been among the most meaningful experiences of my professional career. It’s hard to overstate the impact it had on my growth and development as a successful professional scientist, and no more importantly, the many other identities that define me as a human being.
Biography:
Michel was raised on his family dairy farm in Belgium. In the late 1980s he completed a PhD in Dairy Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the institution he has been associated with for his entire professional career. Throughout the 1990s, Michel was an international dairy extension specialist. He lectured in English, French, and Spanish as he traveled to Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The “Technical Dairy Guides” he authored have been translated in nine languages and use for educational purposes in more than eighty countries. In 2000, Michel became a professor of dairy systems management with substantial instructional responsibilities. His work on the scholarship of teaching and learning contributed to his 2006 promotion and tenure based on excellence in teaching, a rare feat at a “Research” institution. Michel’s teaching has relied on active learning and high impact practices in courses with small to medium size enrollments. He has taught disciplinary and interdisciplinary subjects including dairy nutrition, husbandry, and management, sustainability of food systems, and a course on “Effective Teaching in Internationally Diverse College Classroom.” Overall, he has taught more than 1,900 students in 109 semester-long courses and 17 short-term study abroad programs in Central Mexico. He has organized and facilitated numerous teaching-related workshops nationally and internationally. His teaching CV includes fourteen peer-reviewed publications, seven book chapters, and forty-seven invited presentations. Michel’s disciplinary research has focused on reducing the environmental impacts of milk production at the cow level through empirical studies and at the farm level through modeling and system’s analysis. Recently, he has collaborated with colleagues in Mexico and Canada to transition dairy farming towards more equitable, resilient, and sustainable systems. His research CV includes eighty peer-reviewed publications, eleven book chapters and seventy invited presentations. Michel’s accomplishments have been recognized by twenty-five Awards and Honors.
SoTL Publications and Presentations:
De los Santos, J., MG. Erickson, M. A. Wattiaux, J. J. Parrish. 2023. Retrospective ratings of learning across pre-pandemic, emergency-remote, and post-pandemic instruction in an introductory biology laboratory. NACTA 67:323-329. https://nactajournal.org/index.php/nactaj/article/view/123/75
Erickson, M.G. and M. A. Wattiaux. 2021. Practices and perceptions at the COVID-19 transition in undergraduate animal science courses. Nat Sci Educ. 2021:50:e20039 https://doi.org/10.1002/nse2.20039.
Erickson, M.G., S. Ranathunga, and M. A. Wattiaux. 2020. Animal Sciences undergraduate education since the ASAS centennial: a national survey a scoping review. Transl. Anim. Sci 4:1-16. https://doi.org/10.1093/tas/txaa202.
Wattiaux, M. 2015. Decoding and Encoding the “DNA” of Teaching and Learning in Institutions of Higher Education, pp 1-8, Ch 1 in: Molecular and Quantitative Animal Genetic, Wiley Blackwell (ISBN: 978-1-118-67740-7).
Wattiaux, M. A. 2013. Change in students’ self-reported learning gains and worldviews in a Discussion-driven international livestock agriculture classroom. NACTA J. 57(3):83-90.
Wattiaux, M. A. 2008. Chapter 11: Signature Pedagogy in Agriculture: Animal and Dairy Sciences, Pp 207-223, In: Exploring Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind. R. Gurung, N. Chick and H. Aeron (Eds). Stylus Publishing.
Wattiaux, M. A. 2006. Preparing sophomores for independent learning experiences with a pre-capstone seminar. NACTA 50:19-25.
Wattiaux, M. A. and P. Crump. 2005. Students’ perception of a discussion-driven classroom environment in an upper level ruminant nutrition course with small enrollment. J. Dairy Sci. 89:343-352.