This is a hard one to answer, as lots of things about teaching give me joy. I really like the moment when you see a student get a concept and they explain it back to you. It’s almost like you can actually see the cartoon lightbulb flashing above their head and their face brightens as they realise they’ve got it clear. I am going to push the question and give you another joy from teaching, and that is how much I learn from my students – so often in the classroom I learn something about life, or a new perspective, or even something about the topic back from students.

A portrait of Willa Huston.
Willa Huston.

The best advice for teaching I’ve ever received is…

I have been very lucky to have had lots of teaching mentors with different perspectives, and my teaching approaches have been shaped by all of them. I think that one best piece of advice (from Associate Professor Andy Leigh) is about not being afraid to try something new out in the classroom. She strongly advocates that we always try new approaches, and then reflect and evaluate to see if we want to use them again or not. The other piece of advice is to always tell the students why we are trying different ways to learn things (I can’t recall who first told me this one but certainly several people at UTS have reinforced it!). When we are changing the classroom from their usual comfort zone, if we tell them we think this is a better way to learn it or they are more likely to remember it many of them seem to be more ready to engage in the activity.

My next trip will be…

I am going to Hobart at the end of this week for the Australian Society for Microbiology. This is the main national meeting for my field for both teaching and research and a great chance to network. So much so that one of my collaborators has organised a dinner for those of us that work on Chlamydia and other wildlife diseases titled MangyChlamydiaDinner. Yep, who could resist a dinner with that title?!

If I could be any character from any movie I would be…

Amélie, from Amélie, partially because this is one of my favourite films but also because she followed her curiosity wherever it took her and she is quite quirky but fun.

Willa Huston sitting on the ground with her two Cocker Spaniel dogs.
The ‘fur children’.

Dogs or cats?

This is easy – dogs all the way – I have two extremely spoilt fur children (Cocker Spaniels) that think they rule the house. They are lovely, and they happily tolerate my two other (people) children drawing on them, patting them, and rearranging them into poses for drawing.

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