Event Schedule

Schedule for BC BIO – April 30th 2025 – TRU, NPH 316
Time Block	Speaker(s)/Activity	Topic / Activity
8:00 – 8:30	BREAKFAST
8:30 – 8:45	Leona Thomas (Doe)	Elder Welcome
8:45 – 9:00	Dean Greg Anderson	Opening Remarks
9:00 – 10:00	Prof Nancy Flood and Prof Lyn Baldwin	Plenary Session – “How do we carry biology forward? – the value of an educational community”
10:00 – 10:15	BREAK
10:15 – 10:45	Naowarat (Ann) Cheeptham (on behalf of the 2022 3M NTF cohort)	REFLECT: A Tool for Teaching and Learning Journey by the 2022 3M National Teaching Fellows
10:45 – 11:15	Sarah Goomeshi Nobary	An opportunity for first- and second-year students to do present at a conference
11:15 – 11:45	Dr Barbara Ehlting	Destressing Before Exams
11:45 -12:45	LUNCH
12:45 – 1:15	Dr Solmaz Irani	Redesigning the biology seminars and lab sessions to improve students’ scientific writing
1:15 – 1:45	Ryan Suleman	TBA
1:45 – 2:00	BREAK
2:00 – 4:15	Dr Alexis Brown	WORKSHOP: Teaching Students to Think Like A Biologist

Nancy Flood has taught in the Department of Biological Sciences at TRU for more than 33 years. You name it, she’s been it: part-time, full-time, sessional, regularized; lab instructor, lecturer (“plain-old,” Senior, Principal), Teaching Professor, Department Co-chair. She’s taught majors, non-majors, and even non-science students courses including Intro Bio, biostatistics, writing, evolution, field courses in ecology and ornithology, etc. She’s supervised many research students and has dabbled in online teaching, as well as her preferred classroom/lab/field modalities. She’s served on a wide variety of departmental, faculty and institutional committees, including a long stint as chair of TRU’s Academic Integrity Committee (happily before the arrival of ChatGPT), so has “done” zillions of meetings. The one constant has been the students and colleagues who made it all worthwhile: who helped her develop from a scared, content-driven nerd, to a pretty good teacher in the end. Along the way, she’s raised kids, finished (in geological time) a Ph.D., stayed married, and participated in the life of her city and province. None of it would have been possible without a community of colleagues who mentored, challenged, and supported her—and the biology department itself. Community is vital!

Lyn Baldwin is an award-winning educator and plant conservation biologist who uses art and science to help mitigate society’s extinction of experience with the botanical world. Working from the belief that we will not conserve what we do not know, Lyn uses science and art (creative writing/illustration) to combat society’s plant blindness and extinction of experience with the natural world. Lyn teaches botany, ecology and writing at Thompson Rivers University. For more info about Lyn, see https://lbaldwin.sites.tru.ca.

Alexis Brown is an Educational Developer with the Centre of Excellence for Learning and Teaching (CELT) at Thompson Rivers University (TRU). She has a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, an MEd in Language and Literacies, a Professional Post-Degree in Education, and a B.A. in Ancient and Medieval History. She is the recipient of a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, a Vancouver Foundation Systems Change Grant, and a National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Grant. Alexis has taught in both post-secondary (undergraduate and graduate) and K-12 settings within British Columbia for 16 years. Her teaching and research areas include critical literacies education, multiliteracies, multimodalities, culturally responsive education, and decolonizing education