EAS Student Selected for Future Faculty Fellowship
Fellowship Helps Students Develop Skills Necessary for University Teaching
Peter Anderson, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is one of 20 University of Houston graduate students selected for a Future Faculty Fellowship.
The Future Faculty Fellowship is funded and based off tenants set forth by the Center for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning, a National Science Foundation-funded network of 23 premier universities. The University of Houston is one of the universities involved in this academic pursuit.
Twenty Ph.D. candidates were selected from UH to participate. The awardees were drawn from majors ranging across all the disciplines offered at UH. Six participants were selected from the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM). Anderson was the only student selected from NSM’s EAS department.
The Fellowship program has a four-week training component during fall 2015 that is supplemented by subsequent seminars and workshops throughout the 2015-2016 academic year. The teaching load for each student involved varies from departmental-supported assignment to graduate school assignment. The graduate school assignments are limited to six or so students and facilitated via the development of a new introductory (freshman-level) course that some participants will be allowed to teach.
“During the training course, we have been focusing on examining how students actually learn and what different methods and practices we can employ to facilitate learning,” Anderson said. “We discussed how these various techniques are perceived by the students we teach, and why that matters.”
Anderson is currently in the middle of the training course; he plans to document and share his experience upon completion of the course. Each student participant will be awarded a $1,800 scholarship at the end of the four-week training program.