Professor Graeme Gooday

National Teaching Fellow 2007 Graeme Gooday is Professor of History of Science and Technology, and Director of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. As students from several faculties enrol for his courses in the History of Science with distinctive discipline-specific expectations, he begins by finding out what they can bring to the learning of fellow students. During the first class he asks open questions that enable history students to contribute their special knowledge and science students to comment on scientific matters. Students thus learn from each other, while he learns what he can presume about their prior knowledge, thereafter inviting class contributions from students to help explain unfamiliar points. He says: "A key issue in motivating students to learn history is to make the subject feel relevant to them. For many, the mobile phone and email are the most immediately comprehensible technologies." A parallel commitment to classroom humour, achieved through using cartoons from Punch and Gary Larson, helps students both remember what they have learned and understand the tensions and paradoxes of their subject. He has applied these two strategies in an outreach project, Object Stories, he led for the British Society for the History of Science Outreach Committee. This project aimed to help museums to engage young visitors with their collections by inviting them to write 'autobiographies' of historic artefacts. Read more about Object Stories (external website). His current project Electricity On-line, funded by a University of Leeds Teaching Fellowship, will develop a series of interactive web tutorials to guide students from FE to postgraduate level in critical use of the web resource to debunk popular myths about the history of electricity. Graeme was a co-participant in the foundation of the Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied (IDEA) CETL at Leeds, which he advises on teaching engineering and computing ethics. In 2006 the History of Science Society acknowledged his excellence with the award of the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize for 'outstanding contributions to the teaching of history of science', the highest international accolade for achievement in this field. As the Prize nomination stated: "He has stimulated colleagues across the world to think more honestly and creatively about their teaching."