CTI’s ‘Art of the Lab’ faculty panel to highlight creative approaches to instruction

Labs have come a long way from the frog dissections and flame tests many of us stared down in high school. An upcoming faculty panel, "The Art of the Lab," will explore creative approaches to labs in the wide variety of disciplines at Cornell - a university with a long, rich history of integrating laboratory instruction into undergraduate education.

The second installment of the Center for Teaching Innovation's (CTI) "The Art of Teaching" series, "The Art of the Lab," will focus on the challenges of creating effective and impactful learning experiences in the unique laboratory environment. The event will run from 2-3:30 p.m. Wed. Feb. 11, and is free and open to faculty, graduate students, postdocs and staff.

Panelists include:

• Shivaun Archer, teaching professor in charge of the Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Instructional Laboratories and director of undergraduate studies in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering.
• Sunghwan "Sunny" Jung, professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
• Cristina Schlesier, lecturer in the Department of Physics in the College of Arts & Sciences.

"The Art of the Lab" asks us to consider "how we update the labs for the skills, issues, and problems that we need to be able to solve, whether it's an environmental problem or an ethical issue," said Carolyn Aslan, senior associate director at CTI. "How can you encourage and support students to develop the critical thinking that they need today?"

Labs have always offered a unique, structured space for students to develop field-specific research skills, run experiments that illuminate course concepts, and overall engage in creative learning experiences. But designing and structuring laboratory time to meet learning outcomes and provide students with a dynamic hands-on experience can pose a unique challenge to faculty.

Rather than students using lab time to run a practiced experiment for a specific result, the questions that today's labs pose are more open-ended and encourage student inquiry. Students not only learn how to pose research questions, they also design the experiments that will test those questions, and use their own experiments to conduct their research and interpret the results.

"The Art of the Lab" will highlight the teaching approaches that three Cornell faculty are taking in their courses. The panelists bring both breadth and depth of experience to their labs, which are designed to help students develop the research and thinking skills they'll need in their future careers.

Archer has won three teaching awards from Duffield Engineering, as well as national engineering education awards, and her contributions to instructional labs has led to her being inducted as a fellow into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2023.

In her role at Cornell, Archer designs and teaches labs for five biomedical engineering courses for undergraduates. The labs emphasize biomedical nanotechnology while providing students with training in research methodologies and exposure to cutting edge technology.

A Stephen H. Weiss Presidential fellow, Jung's teaching emphasizes hands-on, project-based learning that shows students how they can have a real-world impact. In Jung's biorobotics lab, students design a bio-robot that's either inspired by biological systems or working for biological systems. For example, students' robots may either use sensors and actuators that monitor the status of plants, or that are inspired by animal movement.

Students build the robots and test the sensors. Jung himself uses biorobotics in his own research, such as when he and colleagues built a snail-inspired robot that could scoop ocean microplastics, an example of the type of ideas he tries to inspire in his students.

Schlesier collaborates with colleagues in the Department of Physics as they redesign their lab courses and move toward inquiry-based lab models, in which students are supported as they learn to pose their own research questions and do their own research around those questions. This approach helps students build skills toward both experimentation and critical thinking, and to better understand the nature of scientific experimentation.

Held once each year, the Art of Teaching series brings faculty together as a community of teaching practitioners, to learn from those who excel at their art, as well as to share ideas and approaches. The series is designed to shine a light on all the different venues -the field sites, the seminar rooms, the studios and the lecture halls - where learning happens at Cornell.