Andy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences and was recently nominated by the University to apply for the Advance HE, National Teaching Fellowship scheme in 2025.
I’ve been at UOB a while. I arrived as a Biology undergraduate in 2005, lured by the prestige, but also by the city’s reputation as the wildlife filmmaking capital of the world. I grabbed opportunities to practice science communication making various films, writing for a student magazine, and volunteering as a public speaker at Bristol Zoo.
That volunteering led to my first real job as a volunteer coordinator at The Zoo straight after graduation. It was an amazing opportunity to converse with a wide range of audiences from pensioners, devoting their time as volunteers, to pre-school kids either eager to hold hissing cockroaches and shake hands with spiders. Parents were less keen.
The curiosity of the young was infectious and led me to Explorer Dome – a Bristol-based outfit who tour schools with science shows delivered within an inflatable planetarium. Transporting students to the edges of the solar system, the inner workings of the human gut, and to different habitats on Earth was so much fun. The multi-sensory, hands-on approach to science mixed with story-telling was definitely hard work, but also incredibly rewarding.
However, it did mean being stuck indoors a lot and I was itching to get back into nature. A research assistant post investigating the impact of light pollution on bats presented itself here. That paved the way for my PhD and the one-year teaching cover post I bagged as I waited for my viva. Skip forward 10 years and I’m now Senior Lecturer, co-directing an exciting Science Communication MSc, which allows me to combine my experiences in ecology, sustainability, media production, outreach and university education.
University education has certainly changed since I arrived 19 years ago and it’s been interesting to witness it from undergraduate, postgraduate, and staff perspectives. “Back in my day…” there were a couple of oral presentations, but assessments seemed very focused on academic writing. Here in Biological Sciences we’ve made massive improvements in assessment and feedback over those two decades, including broadening the diversity of assessments that we offer students.
As part of this collective endeavour, I’ve had fun tearing up an essay task and replacing it with a podcast challenge. As well as flipping the mode of communication, I also changed the audience. Now students get vital practice in communicating complex environmental problems to a general (non-scientific) audience; smashing through the academic echo-chamber that often gets stubbornly lodged as the default within HE assessment design. Students also produce these podcasts in pairs allowing them to hone their communication and teamwork skills while potentially transforming their opinions on topics. Some even share their finished assessments with family and friends, showing a high degree of pride in their work.
Mirroring their pride, I’ve been keen to share my practice at Bristol and beyond. The NTF scheme seems like a great opportunity for this, but also for me to learn from the best in the business. So, I’m chuffed to have been nominated by the University. My thanks to the BILT team for all the time they’ll be investing in me over the coming months, it’s massively appreciated!
