All my professional appointments include a strong focus on teaching and mentoring.
As a teaching assistant during my PhD, I implemented undergraduate lectures and practical sessions informed by my expertise in systematics and paleontology. I used tree-thinking as a framework to help students explore basic concepts in vertebrate anatomy and evolutionary ecology, alternating between lectures, exercises, and breakout sessions. |
My current appointment at the University of Texas features a 50/50 balance of research and teaching/mentorship duties, which I was specifically interested in as an early-career researcher. After 10+ years of training to develop new skills in inclusive pedagogy and project-based teaching, I consider myself a teacher as much as a researcher. I am always looking for opportunities to design and implement new courses, especially when using a project-centered, inquiry-based learning approach.
My teaching philosophy is centered around three major components:
Some of the courses that I have been involved with designing and teaching include:
- Engaging students in a wide array of active learning strategies, both at the individual level and in group activities;
- Developing inclusive teaching resources that are adaptable to diverse learning styles, reflect each student’s individuality, and allow other instructors to develop their own teaching style;
- Focusing my mentorship on specific learning goals for each student, and creating opportunities for them to provide constructive feedback that informs the content and structure of the course.
Some of the courses that I have been involved with designing and teaching include:
Curiosity to Question: research design, data analysis and visualization
The ‘CtQ’ course teaches students from undergraduate to PhD level how to design a research project from start to finish: identifying a research question, assembling and analyzing a dataset, and writing a research paper ready for submission. The class includes many group activities centered on active learning techniques, as well as discussion sections on mentoring research, providing constructive feedback, and interacting as peers who complement each other's expertise in the scientific community.
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In addition to co-authoring the syllabus and organizing presentations for the course, I have designed exercises and R scripts and organized resources for a series of four classes I teach on data collection and analysis in R. I have also co-led group activities and discussions on scientific writing and hypothesis testing. Additionally, all instructors in the class designed and wrote instructional modules for teachers to implement this course in other institutions, which will later be made available on CUREnet as a teaching resource.
For more information about the course, see its dedicated page on the website of its main instructor, Prof. Julia Clarke.
For more information about the course, see its dedicated page on the website of its main instructor, Prof. Julia Clarke.
Courses on general biology, ecology, and paleontology
I have taught several classes at Sorbonne University and the University of Texas at Austin over the past 10+ years, including:
- Life through time: Introductory lectures on evolutionary biology, paleontology, population genetics, and history of evolutionary theory, with discussions and quiz sessions.
- Integrative ecology: basics and applications: Discussion sections with emphasis on general ecology and the link between scientific articles and their counterparts in science journalism.
- Diversity of life: Discussion and lab sections, including exercises on phylogenetics using an HTML-based interactive phylogenetic tree, with emphasis on zoology, comparative anatomy, and evolutionary biology.
- Paleohistology: Lectures on the history of bone histology and the use of phylogenetic comparative methods in bone histology, as well as a mini-workshop on the use of predictive modeling for paleophysiological inference.
Workshops
I regularly organize and/or contribute to workshops in my lab and at conferences, mostly on phylogenetic comparative methods. For more information, see my CV or contact me using the form below.
Feel free to contact me for inquiries, collaborations, ideas, proposals, etc.
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Dr. Lucas Legendre
Research Associate Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences The University of Texas at Austin 2305 Speedway Stop C1160 Austin, TX 78712, United States [email protected] All pictures on this website belong to me, unless mentioned otherwise. |