Meet Andrea Sweigart
Associate Professor of Genetics
When did you start teaching in the WIP?
AS: Spring 2012
What WIP courses are you teaching/have you taught?
AS: GENE 4230L Evolutionary Biology Laboratory
Why did you join the WIP?
AS: To formalize writing instruction in my course and to receive support—from the WIP community, the yearly workshop/meeting, and from the WIP TA.
What is your WIP teaching philosophy?
AS: Writing is an excellent way to learn science and share your ideas with others. Being able to communicate the historical context for your experiments and implications of your results is an essential part of doing science.
How do you put that philosophy into practice in the classroom?
AS: It’s a lab course so students conduct experiments and write reports modeled on papers from scientific journals. We emphasize the importance of setting the stage for experiments by laying out previous findings and big-picture questions.
What are your biggest challenges you face as a WIP teacher/in your WIP courses?
AS: Often students’ understanding of the scientific material is too shallow for them to produce a really well written paper. In many cases, students write well in a technical sense (i.e., their papers have all of the structural elements), but lack coherence and meaning. I think it’s very challenging to write well if you don’t have a fairly good command of the material, which is something that is difficult for beginning students (i.e., undergrads) to achieve in evolutionary biology.
How do you address those challenges?
AS: Over the years, I’ve tried to simplify some of the material. I’ve also cut the number of labs/papers to allow more time for us to delve deeper into each experiment.
What do you hope students take away from your WIP courses? How do students benefit from the writing-intensive nature of your course?
AS: In the best case scenario, I hope they leave more confident in their writing abilities—many of them say they do. Additionally, I hope they understand and retain more of the material we cover than they would without the writing assignments.
Why is it important that students write in your class?
AS: To make sure they learn and absorb the material! Most students in the class are seniors—I want to make sure they graduate from UGA with strong communication and writing skills.