EduCon 2022 report

EduCon 2022 was held in Sydney at the NSW Teachers Federation Conference Centre on 15 July, and was organised by a team comprising Thiru Vanniasinkam (Convenor), Megan Lloyd (Past Convenor), Meredith Hughes, Priscilla Johanesen, İpek Kurtböke, Rebecca LeBard, Megan Lenardon, Senaka Ranadheera and Gal Winter. The conference was attended by a small group of enthusiastic and committed educators.

Meredith Hughes as the 2021 David White Teaching Award winner gave a presentation on designing authentic assessments in microbiology, providing useful examples that attendees could use to develop assessments in courses they teach. The keynote presentation was on Promise and Practice of the inclusive given by a leading researcher in this area, Dr Bryan Dewsbury (Florida International University, USA). The talk was highly relevant to all participants as the presenter shared his experiences teaching a culturally diverse classroom with a large of number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

There were two workshops. One was a ‘back to basics’ workshop run by a team from Charles Sturt University (Wouter Kalle, Thiru Vanniasinkam and Kerry Hicks) looking at learning outcomes in the context of a novel model of course delivery to a diverse student cohort. The other workshop delivered by Nick Andronicus from UNE looked at animation in teaching. Participants used Adobe Captivate to build a lesson in the workshop, with Nick’s expert advice.

Four oral presentations were included in the program. Lara Grollo from The University of Melbourne shared her experiences on using COVID-19 as a ‘teaching moment’, while Daniel Clark (The University of Melbourne) gave an interesting presentation on innovation in the parasitology class. Graça Carvalho and Nelson Lima (from the University of Minho, Portugal) shared their perspective on transposition of science knowledge to school teaching. Petra Czarniak (Curtin University) talked about the importance of simulation-based education in the context of treating infectious diseases.

There were six posters presented on a range of interesting topics, many of these stemming from experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Poster topics (and presenters) included infection and immunity using craft materials (Charmaine Lloyd, Swinburne Institute of Technology), microbiology capstone projects (Senaka Ranadheera, The University of Melbourne), authentic student-led research projects (Brianna Steed, The University of Melbourne), strategies for online student engagement (Lana Ly, University of New South Wales), authentic scenarios in microbiology education at home (Gal Winter, University of New England) and self-regulated learning (Nathan Higgins, Monash University).

The final session was a roundtable discussion led by İpek Kurtböke from the University of the Sunshine Coast on teaching microbiology for achieving sustainable development goals. This session gave participants the opportunity to share their ideas on microbiology education and was a great way to end the conference.