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Teaching
Teaching Responsibilities:
I fulfill the responsibilities of my appointment by
teaching each year a one-term (Winter) graduate and senior undergraduate course
entitled Fisheries Oceanography,
and a one-term (Winter) course entitled Marine Sciences and Technology
to candidates for Masters of Marine Management in the Marine Affairs
Programme, Faculty of Management. In addition, I contribute each year with guest
lectures for other courses at Dalhousie and elsewhere.
Teaching Philosophy and Methods:
I consider my approach to teaching as more or less
Socratic. Through stimulating questioning, with the aid of relevant information
(existing theory, empirical relationships, known functions and processes etc.)
detailed or summarized graphically, students are better able to grasp concepts
and gain new insights that they are less likely to forget nor to easily
dismiss. This works because students are motivated to make the effort to arrive
at the concepts and/or reach conclusions themselves. I see my role primarily as
motivational and secondarily as that of guide and constructive critic. This kind
of teaching is not necessarily appreciated by all students. For lecture
material I draw primarily on quantitative examples from the literature that are
provided online, and each of which are examined and critically evaluated and in
lectures. I supplement some lectures with teaching videos on specific topics or
through guest lecturers who have an expertise relevant to the lecture topic or
series. I also encourage Teaching Assistants to provide one or two lectures,
generally in the area that is mutually relevant to the course content and the
TA's research area. This serves to provide the TA with some lecturing
experience and allows the students some insights into the realm of graduate research.
Top of page
Fisheries Oceanography Course Material:
My lectures focus on the ecology of marine fish
(including some of the significant advances made in freshwater systems) from an
oceanographic perspective and on the biotic and abiotic
influences on marine fish population dynamics and production, distribution and
abundance. The lectures include distribution (range and abundance),
reproduction (fecundity, spawning etc.), early life history (feeding, growth,
mortality) and some aspects of physiology and metabolism (physiological cycles
and condition) and recruitment variability and forecasting. Emphasis is placed
on the hydrological and meteorological processes influencing the above, and the
majority of the material is drawn either directly from the primary literature
(papers provided online) or from a series of texts that are on permanent
reserve status in the library during the course. For the majority of lecture
topics I attempt to focus on current problems and hypotheses and fruitful
research directions, approaches and techniques. I also place some emphasis on
the application of scientific insights to fishery management and assessment
techniques (e.g. the fundamentals of virtual population analysis). I do not
require the students to purchase a particular text. However, several chapters
of Rothschild's (1986) "Dynamics of Marine Fish Populations"
and Ricker's (1975) "Computation and Interpretation of Biological Statistics
of Fish Populations" are mandatory reading and several lectures are
developed from and around them. Other significant texts are recommended and
placed on library reserve.
Students are required to write a primary-publication-style research paper using
original data extracted directly from the literature, technical reports, and known
databases. Several colleagues at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography have
been exceedingly generous with their time and data in assisting some students
to secure the data necessary to address their particular question/hypothesis.
This research paper has proven successful as the students appreciate this
opportunity to write (for many the first time) a quantitative treatise in a
scientific format. Several research papers have led directly to graduate
studies based on insights gained through the research paper and/or a primary
publication, e.g.:
1.
Enin,
2.
Jones, M. and C. T. Taggart. 1998.
Distribution of gill parasite (Lernaeocera branchialis) infection in Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and
parasite- induced host mortality: inferences from tagging data. Canadian
Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 55:364-375.
3.
Ward, P.J. and R.A. Myers. 2006.
Do habitat models accurately predict the depth distribution of pelagic fishes?
Fisheries Oceanography 15(1):60-66.
Other research papers that reflect a broad range of interests and
insights gained during the course have included:
·
An examination of the exponential
decay model using herring larvae (Clupea harengus) abundance estimates collected from the
scientific literature. By Mark Robinson.
·
The effects of sea surface
temperature on the returns of Atlantic Salmon (Salmo salar) to six
·
The effect of egg size on
incubation time. By Leah Poirier
·
Effect of annual temperature range
on fish species diversity. By Kissa Mwakiyango.
·
Analysis of Atlantic
·
An exploratory method for
assessing periodicity of fish stocks and the validity of the constant total
biomass hypothesis on the Magdalen Shallows (NAFO
Division 4T). By Tyler MacKenzie