Tim Lougheed
The University of Ottawa Excellence in Education Prizes honour exceptional educators who provide instruction of incomparable quality while conducting solid research programs. A profile of each of the nine 2007 recipients will appear in the Gazette in the coming months.
 |
|
You may give little thought to the way your body moves, until you try to master a complex task like playing the piano or driving a standard transmission. Yet for Ramesh Balasubramaniam, such mental and physical challenges are only the most obvious examples of remarkable neurophysiological accomplishments that we carry out every day.
As an associate professor in the School of Human Kinetics, he has devoted much of his career to feats of human action that most of us take for granted, such as posture, balance, simple voluntary motion and the timing of simple repetitive actions. He takes nothing for granted, probing mysterious mechanisms like the one we use to measure intervals between events.
This complex pursuit attracts students from diverse backgrounds, including biochemistry, physics, electrical engineering, bioinformatics and neuroscience, as well as Balasubramaniam’s own field of human kinetics. He marshals their skills and knowledge to carry out elaborate studies, using a laboratory outfitted with cameras and other equipment for analysing the movement, behaviour and even the neurological status of test subjects.
His ability to meet the widely varying expectations of these students is reflected in the fact that Balasubramaniam is one of this year’s recipients of the University of Ottawa Excellence in Education Prize.
In fact, he consciously draws all participants into the intricacies of this work, enabling each of them to map out the limits of their own understanding. He does this through regular sessions that adopt a Socratic method — a question-and-answer approach — for tackling developments in the field.
“It is one of the few strategies that will work in a very diverse group like this,” Balasubramaniam explains. “Every week we have a reading of, say, a journal article. I usually target each person in the group and ask them very pointed questions. They try to answer one piece of it, and someone else will answer another piece of it, and in a purely self-organized fashion they try to come up with a solution together.”
He acknowledges that it can be a shock for individuals who have risen to the forefront in one area to realize that they know next to nothing about another area that is essential to the research. Grasping that harsh reality, though, is what sets the stage for further learning and greater insights about what can be very straightforward issues.
“It’s a very important part of the pedagogical process, to teach my students to be fascinated by what they do so they can explain it to others. I always ask them, can you explain this to your grandmother? If you can, then you’ve got a working experiment.”
Related Links:
