The Welsh word “dysgu” (pronounced “dusk-ee) means both to learn and to teach. While I must admit, this confused me greatly in my Welsh language lessons, it also provided the perfect opportunity to reflect on my recent National Teaching Fellowship award and how vital learning has been (and continues to be) in my teaching approach and philosophy.
In 2016, as a very recent post-doctoral researcher, I stood at the front of a class of 80 undergraduate students to deliver my first ever lecture. I didn’t hold a teaching contract, but I had volunteered because I thought it would be good to increase my teaching experience. I’d previously done lots of postgraduate demonstrating during bioscience practical classes and I held Associate Fellowship but I hadn’t ever delivered a lecture before.
Thankfully the lecture that I’d been asked to deliver was on my specialist subject of Huntington’s disease, something that I’d spent over three years specialising in for my PhD. When I began to design my lecture, I took myself back to when I first learnt about Huntington’s disease. My undergraduate degree was in Biochemistry, and I then made a somewhat unusual transition into Neuroscience for my PhD. That meant that I had a very steep learning curve to understand some of the basics of my PhD. In fact, I vividly remember scrambling to scribble down notes during my first PhD lab meeting which included a section ‘words to look up’!
