̽̽ Nutrition and Food Sciences Associate Professor Lizzy Pope asks her students to embody bile, triglycerides, or hydrochloric acid. Then they learn about fat digestion as part of a musical which utilizes multiple pop songs to help students remember the science of nutrition. This is just one tactic in a full arsenal of educational tools developed during her nine years as a ̽̽ professor. She developed this strategy to keep her large classes such as Fundamentals of Nutrition, which usually enrolls close to 300 students per term, learning the science of nutrition. Getting students engaged in a class this size is a challenge for any faculty member, but Pope has piloted multiple strategies that have led to high levels of student-reported satisfaction with her teaching.
“When I'm teaching my nutrition class, my philosophy is to help students develop a more peaceful relationship with food and their bodies,” Pope said. “My goal is to help students think more critically about nutrition because there's so much misinformation. Science can ground them in their own sense of knowing and then they understand where they can go for reliable sources to answer their questions about nutrition, versus the TikTok influencer or other sources of information that come at you like siren songs.”
Pope has made an effort to integrate a connection to culture, especially pop culture, into her teaching. “I've always tried to integrate pop culture into my class. It takes a variety of forms like funny videos or Twitter memes, or as the times change the examples change. Social media is just so ubiquitous, and we know that Gen Z especially is using TikTok. It’s the most popular social media platform with younger people, so I got really interested in how TikTok shapes nutrition dialogue for this generation.” Watch this with Pope’s class taking a stretch break to a Taylor Swift tune.
Her innovative approach to teaching and the positive responses Pope receives from students have been repeatedly recognized with teaching awards by ̽̽. Most recently, she was given the in the synchronous category for her course entitled Fundamentals of Nutrition.
Creating Videos for Online Learning
Pope said that being honored with the Prelock Award stemmed from teaching online during the COVID-19 pandemic. “During COVID, there wasn’t a physical room capacity limit, so my online class had over 300 people in it,” she stated. “There's no way that I can have 300 people on a Teams call twice a week and think that they're going to pay any attention. So, I spent the summer before I taught online creating content videos.”
She decided to act out concepts around her house, such as using the outdoor pool to talk about cells and water. “The pool is a cell, and the pool floats were different organelles. I added a soundtrack and other visuals and said this is going to be really good!” Pope taught herself how to use the video editing software Final Cut Pro and found copyright-free music to use.
“I was so into it,” Pope said. “I think that it could have only happened at the beginning of the pandemic when we weren't allowed to go anywhere. All summer long I was just so driven to create this set of videos.”
The following semester, her classroom flipped where students were able to watch the videos at their leisure and go back to continue learning from them. Pope would follow up with intensive iClicker session to actively engage students with the material from afar. “The students did so well. They were so active in the chat,” she stated. “They were building community in a way that I had not expected, and they really liked the format. They liked the videos, and it helped me learn so much about a new approach to teaching.”
Re-imaging Course Instruction
Pope considers the Prelock Award as validation for the work she did to re-imagine the course, and all the formatting of content she had to think through. Previously, her course consisted of four in-class exams and a final project, but it got to the point where she felt like it no longer worked with her teaching philosophy. That first remote semester forced a change because Pope couldn’t have in-class exams. She re-worked the format of course assessments and teamed up with other professors at the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) to form a choice-based grading group. With the support of the CTL staff, they learned this new method of assessment together and deployed it in courses that fall.
“The new assessments give students choices for how they earn points for a course,” Pope explained. “If they want to complete several quizzes, they can. If they'd rather complete more assignments and fewer quizzes, they can do it that way. The goal is to help reduce stress and give them more agency.”
The grading scheme for Pope’s course also changed. She had to make 12 new assignments, 13 new quizzes, and create an entirely new class format: switching the class to online was like an incredible labor of love. Pope has taken a lot of what she did while teaching remotely and now uses it for in-person courses.
“In academia, teaching is not always rewarded. I'm a tenured professor which means that a lot of my incentive is based on my research work, but I love to teach, so that's why the online class was the epitome of my creative approach to teaching,“ Pope stated. “I did nothing else that entire year. Go to my class, and my teaching work, and I had this great group at CTL, and we were doing this whole thing together around our teaching work which was also research and was cool. I just care so much that my students learn about nutrition in a healthy way.”
As Pope was transitioning her course to online instruction, she wondered, how do you build connection in such a large class? How do you make students feel that they're not just a number? If they don't come to class, will I know? Helping students feel connected to the course material by also building a sense of connection to the class is the core of her teaching philosophy. “We can have fun, right? And we can still learn a lot and sometimes we need to have fun in order to learn.”
Learning How to Think
Many of Pope’s students haven't learned about nutrition before taking her course. While it is important to learn something new, Pope says it is almost just as important to think differently about the things you’ve already learned. She considers development of critical thinking and information connoisseur skills very important in today's world. “In a world that is filled with misinformation everywhere, especially in the science realms, you have to learn what is good science.”
During Pope’s doctoral and post-doctoral research, she was very interested in studying behavioral economics and health behaviors, or how forces shape people’s mostly unconscious decisions making around health. However, she considers her current work like a career change of sorts. Her research is on weight inclusivity, which is the idea that weight is not a primary indicator of health, and that by seeing it as such, and seeing “obesity” as a problem, it just drives anti-fat bias and stigmatizing behaviors in healthcare, as well as driving eating disorder development.
Although her students know about diversity, equity, and inclusion in other realms, they might not think about how it applies in nutrition. As soon as Pope introduces the concept, she said “they're like yeah, of course, weight inclusivity, and they feel relieved that they are not doing nutrition police in the course.” She summed up student reactions by stating, “I thought you were just gonna tell me don't eat this, eat this, be in this weight range, and they are so relieved, and then they're so jazzed.”
Reflecting on Personal Experience
Pope explained that much of her teaching is based on her own, less-than-ideal undergraduate experiences. She became a professor because her own higher ed experience wasn’t that great. “I was a student who probably should have taken a gap year. I always think that if there had just been one person with whom I could have connected in my first one or two years, like a professor or advisor, that may have really turned around my experience.” By her junior and senior year, Pope had made some of those connections and felt like she had a place, and also felt her purpose more. She said, “The class that I teach is full of first- and second-year students, and in those years just feeling like someone might care about you, or your interests, or your struggles, or your goals, I know can make a big difference. I think that drives the type of class that I want to run.”
For many students, college is the first place where they are more independent. Higher education is about knowledge generation, but it's also about learning to be who you are in a new place. Supporting students so they can figure this out is central for Pope, “whether it is through their academics, which is my primary role, but also life, is not all academics. Supporting students to reach their goals is a big part of what I try to do.”