James Sikes

Please tell us about the journey that led you to teaching. 

My journey is strange—not what you’d expect. I went to a liberal arts college and had great teachers, but I was the student who never spoke, who really struggled with self evaluation and confidence. I needed a work study job, and started knocking on doors. The second one I came to was the Department of Education, and they were looking for someone to staff the curriculum library. I was almost through the hiring process before they realized I wasn’t seeking an education major or teaching certification, so I declared just for the sake of getting the job. So then I started taking education courses and everything changed. Educational Psychology and Human Development changed my life, and I fell into the teaching world. I continued as a biology major, and these education classes were a great addition. In my final year, I started student teaching, which threw me into a classroom for the first time. During that entire trimester, I learned so much about teaching and how to engage students, and I loved it. I never intended to actually do the teaching gig, but I loved it so much that I stayed in South Carolina and taught high school for five years. It was challenging; I cried a lot in that first year.  The students were 18 and I was only 22. Initially I tried to be the classroom boss; later, I tried to be the cool guy on the block—both backfired. After I figured out the balance, I loved teaching and time flew by. But I knew that I wanted to be a scientist, so I moved on to grad school. I TA’d there to help pay the bills, and one course really stood out. It was a Desert Ecology course where the professor, students, and I traveled to the Southwest in Arizona. During this field course, I saw students transformed by their experiences, by doing ecology in the field, and being immersed in the desert, rather than just learning about it from a class or textbook. I learned that if I can offer opportunities for students to do something and really experience something, they remember and learn it in a completely different way. 

What experiences or events have had the most influence on your teaching pedagogy?

As I look back, the most transformative experience was growing up on a farm in rural America. I would not have said this at age 18, when I just wanted to get out of the small town, but I now realize that I had a living lab around me. I was the kid breeding chickens, hypothesizing about what the chicks would look like. Such experiences truly transformed me. The experimentation and doing allowed me to walk into college knowing a lot more about biology than those who had just taken advanced courses. Breeding livestock and cross-pollinating flowers on the farm really influenced my pedagogy today. I try to give students such experiences that allow them to walk out feeling more confident, knowing content deeper, and feeling a connection to their learning. There were some educators who manifested this in my own education. Dr. Bill Teska was my ecology professor. When he had lectured about island biogeography, it felt so abstract, but then we went out on a field trip to a mountain top. Here Dr. Tesla led us in collecting data on habitat islands.  The patterns of biodiversity predicted by theory came to life and were real.  I learned island biogeography theory and remember it today because I experienced it; I learned by doing it. I still channel Dr. Tesla often. He took students abroad often, primarily to Costa Rica. When he passed away, alumni donated a plaque for him in the rainforest. Now I take students to the same field station, and I always visit that plaque when I’m there where I tell him I hope I’m doing him proud. 

Please share a classroom or teaching moment that brought you joy.

The theme that I thought about for this question is when students make connections, lightbulbs go off and transformations are made. One of the best examples is from my Galapagos immersion course. We were driving to our field site, and a student looked out the window, and said, “those are bananas growing on a tree!” She was like, “Guys! Bananas grow on trees, and they come out of the top, and they’re part of a flower.” There was a moment when her curiosity overwhelmed her—her surprise at seeing this; her connection to basic biology; and the experience on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean collectively led to learning. Now when she goes to the grocery store, she doesn’t see this common fruit in the same way. A second example was in my developmental biology course, when we were reviewing cell differentiation. The students taking this course are juniors and seniors who have learned so much already; they know what DNA is, how cells communicate, etc. In one of the first classes when I reviewed these core biology concepts, a student stopped the class discussion to say, “Wait, you’re telling me that the cells in my toe have the same DNA sequences as the cells in my brain, helping me think right now?!” The connection was utterly transformative. She’d been learning these facts for years, but in that moment everything came together .There’s joy for me in such teaching moments. That’s what I get excited about. It happens so frequently in labs and field experiences. I tell my students, the lightbulb moments that they experience cause me to have an internal celebration. 

What excites you most about helping students connect biology concepts to real-world issues and solutions?

What comes to mind is my Evolution course, which is the capstone for the biology major here at USF. When students walk through the door on day 1, evolution is an enigmatic thing that they have heard is controversial. But soon,  they develop what I call the “evolutionary goggles” that allow them to see the world differently. Developing these goggles is a transformative experience. Everything in biology is connected through evolution. Why do some plants grow so tall and live for centuries, while others live less than a week? What excites me is helping students make these connections. After taking evolution, the grocery store doesn’t look the same. My students are amazed to learn that so much of the produce you see are all the same species. Kale, radishes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower are all the same plant species, but we humans used artificial selection to emphasize different parts. I’m excited that my students can now walk into the grocery store and tell their grandmother the evolutionary processes that explain something we all take for granted. Another great example is when I ask students, “If you wanted to see large animals in the world, where would you go?” The answer is an African safari—why?  Why don't we have similar numbers of large animal species in North America? The connection that students make is the realization that  humans co-evolved with animals in Africa, so the animals adapted to avoid being hunted. But when humans left that African continent, animals in other parts of the world encountered a cunning new predator, having not evolved alongside humans. So we as a predator likely wiped  out the large animals as we migrated across the continents. Helping students see these connections encourages them to ask questions they’ve never asked before. I encourage students to go back to the questioning nature of a four year old. Kids ask questions like, “Why does the camel have a hump?  Why does the elephant have tusks?” The beauty of biology is that we have answers for all these questions. As students progress through the biology major, they move from answers based on the ecological (adaptations for the environment) to answers focused on genetic and molecular reasons—a true transformation of understanding.

What topics do you feel are most urgent to teach in your field today, and what impact do you hope your teaching will have on students?

My answer is connecting biology, the principles of life, to the challenges of society today. Climate change is an obvious challenge, and there are medical transformations occurring in stem cell biology and CRISPR. We, as instructors, need to think about how to instill a solid biological grounding in our students to allow them to deal with the ethical implications of what we’ve done and what we’re doing. How are we going to maintain an ethical lens for society’s future? One piece of this puzzle I focus on in my courses is how to critically analyze data, draw conclusions, and then effectively communicate this to the world? I ask students nearly daily to think about how they would tell their grandmother about what we’re learning. I work with students all semester about how to write, how to talk, and how to communicate. This is not often considered the norm for a biology curriculum, but it is so important.