Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Outreach & CVs

A question for the professors in the audience: how would you classify/interpret outreach curriculum development on a CV for someone interested in teaching positions?

To clarify, I'm currently working on putting together several panel modules of demonstration experiments to present at next year's local steampunk convention. I'll be working heavily from the materials I got from volunteering at Teacher Camp, but I'm really trying to orient it towards my audience, so there will be a lot of customization. All in all, I'm hoping to do 3-4 panels this year, and add more variety as there is interest in future years. It's not a traditional outreach audience, as the K-12 members of the audience will likely be the minority.

My program offers fairly limited opportunities to teach, and pretty much no opportunities to develop courses. I was able to snag one of the few TA positions where you get any chance to lecture, and have more interaction with students than answering homework questions at recitation. I see this both as a way to get more practice teaching and a way to share my knowledge with an interested audience (I'm developing these panels at the request of some non-sciency friends).

Is there anything I should try and do to document these? Specific feedback I should ask for? Should outreach even be on my CV?

2 comments:

  1. Yes, put it on your CV, but in order to do that you will need to tie the panels directly back to the science. I assume this is what you plan to do, but that will be key. I can't imagine that any type of feedback you would get would be useful for a job package, but it's the kind of thing that might stand out and that people would ask you about in an interview.

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    1. The goal is for these to be science first and steampunk second. Really, the steampunk aspect just influences which science topics I'll be covering (corrosion, pressure vessels, materials selection in building dirigibles...) Thanks for the feedback!

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