By MARTY LEVINE
Unless instructors help students to understand how classroom material will build their futures, “we end up just stuffing students with a lot of facts,” says biological sciences faculty member Kirill Kiselyov.
His 2023 Innovation in Education Award-winning proposal — one of seven such awards this year from the Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence — aims to fix that issue by incorporating storytelling into the Dietrich School of Arts & Science’s cell biology class, and eventually others.
The course is a cornerstone offering of his department, with difficult and challenging material, including “a lot of multilayered and dynamic content,” he notes. Communicating the importance of this material to students’ careers increases their interest and understanding, Kiselyov says.
He plans to use a method of storytelling that is commonly used at scientific conferences — the poster, with student groups presenting their content to the rest of their class.
By sharing these poster “stories” with their classmates, students should better understand how class materials connect to current scientific endeavors, to their lives and to the rest of their education, Kiselyov explains.
He has already tested this approach in another, somewhat smaller class and published a peer-reviewed journal article noting those students’ “marked improvement in self-efficacy and factual knowledge.” Now he hopes that testing it in a bigger course can show that storytelling is valuable for all manner of classrooms and, of course, for other topics, and that students will find class topics more relevant to their lives.
Student groups will work on their posters across a semester, choosing certain class content to relate to current advances in science. Each student poster group will make its presentation online, with their classmates watching and questioning them, which is aimed at saving in-class time, Kiselyov says.
He plans to look at how different types of students find this storytelling useful in different ways.
“I see posters essentially as a sandbox where a group of students can play” — come together and collaborate, in a way that is “more pleasant than other forms of group work,” he says.
Early experience with class poster presentations online, rather than in-person during the class, has been “remarkably smooth and remarkably effective,” he reports. “Ultimately, during each session the entire group gets to speak.” As for the response of the students watching the presentation: “Judging by the questions and reactions, they do get involved.”
After each poster session he tried prior to this award, he tested the participants: “Students gained both enthusiasm as well as factual knowledge,” he says. “You clearly see how students light up when they present their part and they are proud” of their work — versus the solemnity or frustration he has seen on too many faces during final exams.
By the end of the project year, Kiselyov plans to determine how best to undertake these poster presentations, which groups of students benefit best and least from this technique and how it might be modified to serve the latter.
“We rarely allow students to play or become their future selves and I think that this approach allows them to … model their future professional activities,” he concludes. “I think it can be inspiring and rewarding.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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