Nicole Wagner Receives Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award
-Written by Sanath Aithala, Ph.D. Student
The University of Minnesota’s department of Earth and Environmental Sciences would not be the program it is without the tireless contributions of graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants. In addition to their typical roles of assisting with course materials, teaching laboratory courses, and grading, TAs in the geosciences are responsible for creating a tactile learning environment with hands-on lab demonstrations and components of field work. This is especially true for the Earth & Environmental Sciences Advanced Field Geology Course – an intense three-week field course where TA’s lead undergraduate students as they map and survey complex igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary terrains in and around Ely, Minnesota. The department is pleased to announce that M.S. student, Nicole Wagner, has gone above-and-beyond and has been awarded the National Association of Geoscience Teachers’ January 2023 “Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award,” for her excellence in teaching Advanced Field Geology.
In Advanced Field Geology, students are required to interpret the geologic history of an area based on their observations and intuition. As a result, there is no “answer sheet” that would allow for assessing students in classes with more traditional assignments. Instead, instructors survey the field themselves and guide students to make precise measurements to come up with their own interpretations of the geology. Nicole was effective in assisting groups of students with mapping and rock identification by communicating in person and over walkie-talkie out in the field area. In addition to being an intellectual resource in the field, Nicole played a major role in ensuring the physical and emotional well-being of students by transporting gear, cooking, cleaning, going into town to grab resources, and serving as a liaison between students and instructors. Nicole attributes her success in teaching Advanced Field Geology to her emphasis on relating to the students, recollecting her own recent experience as a Field Geology student a few summers ago. Nicole recalls her own summer field camp as being physically, intellectually, and emotionally taxing and wanted to make sure that the field was a safe environment for learning.
When asked about what it meant to win the NAGT TA award, Nicole expressed that her main motivation for teaching Advanced Field Geology was to work on making the course more accessible for all students and that the recognition from NAGT reassured her that her first experience teaching the course was effective.
The NAGT’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award is awarded on a semiannual basis to less than 15 geoscience TAs around the world. To learn more about the NAGT, the Outstanding TA Award, past recipients, and details on how to nominate teaching assistants, visit https://nagt.org/nagt/students/ta.html