Transcript of the Interview:
Harris (Interviewer): I think I did that...oh okay...be sure to let everyone know you are being recording. Alright, Dr. Clark, you are being recorded right now!
Dr. Clark (Interviewee): Okay, thank you.
Harris: I'm with the internship and special archives department and I just wanted to ask you a little bit about your experiences at Texas Wesleyan at a certain time period for my project that I'm doing. The first question I really wanted to ask you was: What scientific change during the span of 1990 to about 2009 was the most impactful to your teaching and how did that come about?
Dr. Clark: I think, what has been changing the most is the increase in the number of genomes that have been sequenced. That's been really interesting, I mean when the first genome got sequenced the interesting thing about it, the human genome, one of the first big genome that got sequenced. And as more animal genomes got sequenced, I think that the interesting thing was how similar, how many genes everybody had in common. I thought that was fascinating. Bunch were a little bit different because, as you know, they come from different lineages some of the animals do. That was the relationship among organisms and what that revealed I think was just very exciting.
Harris: Yeah, I do remember in biology class talking about genomes and the percentage of what it relates to what other animal. So, mapping out all of the genomes is what you think is the most impactful to the science community? Did it steer how you taught in any way when that was discovered?
Dr. Clark: Well, I think I did incorporate a lot of that as it came out and the other thing, I think, yeah, the other thing was probably bio-technology.
Harris: Yeah, that's the big part of that era is just the increase in technology and the accessibility of it. Because there was computers and whatnot in the 1980s but going to the 1990s and 2000s, there has been an increase in accessibility which what I think was important. I'd love to hear your take on it: How technology really shaped education during this time.
Dr. Clark: Well, one thing I really love and I use it a lot in my classes is the accessibility of the databases because they are mostly public, I mean, mostly you can get into a database. It might not be real obvious to find but you can always find it. The resources are always published when the genomes are published. And so, I did a little project recently using Genome, the komodo dragon was sequenced and that was a few years ago and that's one of those big lizards and I thought "Oh, let's see if we can find any komodo dragon genes" because it hadn't been, the annotation hasn't been published yet. just the sequences were there. So you could go browse around in them. I had a lot of fun doing that but the nice thing about that sort of thing is it's accessible for students also. That puts all that information right at their fingertips because, you know, computers.
Harris: Of course. Do you think there was a steep learning curve with students having to learn technology or did they come into knowing more about the technology the school had to offer? Like, computer literacy is another way to put it.
Dr. Clark: That is quite variable, access is variable among the student population, and as you probably know, you had to deal with that during the kind of shutdown for COVID. Some people just didn't have computer access they needed to get to classes and I know we had some chrome computers that we made accessible to some of the students. So, It's not uniform and so students will have different amounts of experience using technology. Would you please get off? (In reference to her dog) Thank you. Let me bribe them again. (Again, referring to her dogs) And it will go back for a while.
Harris: Of course.
Dr. Clark: When I was first doing Zoom meetings and the first thing they learned was that it's a really good time to come get a treat because I would give them anything to make them go away.
Harris: They know it's feeding time! So, essentially, it's the same concept of today where it varies from here, different amounts of computer literacy to back then in 1990 to 2009. People come from different backgrounds and it's not a uniform, they don't know or they do know. It depends on what their experiences are.
Dr. Clark: Exactly. So, people have different amounts of experience with the software. And for a while, we made sure to teach things like how to teach Microsoft Word or how to use Excel and things like that. We would incorporate those into mostly the labs. I think it was probably true for the English department too. It certainly changed writing, before computers and before online and before word processing, if you wanted to modify something you had to retype it! You had to just do it over again! And now editing is so much different.
Harris: Very convenient. Alright, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about your personal experience at Texas Wesleyan. What would you say you enjoy most about teaching at Texas Wesleyan specifically? What makes it special for teaching at this institution given your credentials and achievements.
Dr. Clark: I think there are two things that have kept me at Texas Wesleyan and really make me love it. One is class size, the class size is generally small, especially in the labs because you can only get so many people into a laboratory! So, that's been really good and is what attracted me to Texas Wesleyan in the first place. I was looking for a small institution. The other thing is the fact that it is a small class in a relatively small faculty, we have 50, maybe, people on the faculty. So you get to know the faculty across the campus more than you would in a large institution. I taught at UTA for a while and Biology and Psychology were in this monster building and Chemistry was halfway across campus in another monster building and I not only didn't see any people in English or History, I didn't even see people from the other Sciences very often! Because of our separation and at Wesleyan, you don't have that. We do have little cubbies across the campus, there's a science building and a literature building and so forth. But they are not very far apart! That's made it possible for me to teach in areas that I wouldn't been able to otherwise. I taught a humanities class for a while and that was just terrific! It was just wonderful! I was team-taught by people from a lot of different departments from across the campus. We all met together at least once a week and that was just great. I was able to participate in the honors program and work with other faculty doing that, mostly in English. That's been wonderful. In fact, I've taught a couple of times with Dr. Battles and as you know, she is amazing.
Harris: Yes I do. She will probably be watching this so Dr. Battles, you are extremely good at your job. We'll continue with that. It's definitely a connected community, very accessible and open-door. You can get anywhere on campus in 5 minutes.
Dr. Clark: Exactly!
Harris: So that's what attracted you to Texas Wesleyan. Even though there may have been other universities or institutions who probably have more advanced science programs, it's more about in Texas Wesleyan about you connecting with students and with that smaller size to have more intimate kind of learning experience.
Dr. Clark: Well, the departments are smaller too, when we were still all on campus together and when I was there full-time in the department, we would still meet pretty frequently. The department used to meet pretty frequently and often we would go out to lunch somewhere. I think that socialization helped, honestly I think we have one of the most functional departments on the campus. We met so often under those kinds of situations that encouraged friendly conversation and that kind of thing. It was a very important factor in our success.
Harris: Of course. You know, A well-oiled team.
Dr. Clark: In fact, I'm having tacos with Dr. Benz today!
Harris: Awesome! Yeah, it sounds like Texas Wesleyan is a very--it's like a small town by itself, essentially. Everyone knows each other.
Dr. Clark: It is, it is. The interesting thing is before I came over here, I didn't even know it was here. I drove past it probably every few weeks taking my daughter to the orthodontist. What caught my attention was not the Wesleyan campus on one side of the street, it was Mama's Pizza on the other side of the street! So, that was the landmark there. When I started looking for a smaller place, I was at UTA and there was 300 people in my freshman class. I couldn't even see to the back of the room. So, I wanted to try a smaller place because I've been to smaller schools, I got my graduate degree at a smaller institution. There was an article in the paper when they got a new president at Wesleyan. I was like "oh my god, there's a school over there!" So I wrote them a letter, I wrote Dr. Streett a letter and told him I was interested in finding a teaching job at a smaller institution. He wrote back "as a matter of fact, I'm retiring next year and we're going to be looking for someone." So, they hadn't even advertised the job yet.
Harris: It seemed like the perfect fit.
Dr. Clark: It was wonderful, it was so lucky.
Harris: Yeah, so you've been teaching at Texas Wesleyan for a long time and around 1990 during this time period you've been here for about 11 years. Can you describe the scientific scene at the time, of you and your peers? What was really the exciting prospects your scientific peers were talking about in the community? I've heard more about the genomes but what was really--we can still talk about that, I'm sure there's many facets we can go into--but was that the main discovery that everyone was excited about?
Dr. Clark: Well, since I was teaching genetics that's what I was excited about. Everyone else, you would have to ask them. I think what was going on in the 90s, shouldn't seem that long ago. 30 years ago, my God. Let me see...I think the important thing that was happening, especially for education. There was a lot more technology being available in the labs. There are students who are able to do really interesting things. A lot of biology used to be things like "well let's dissect this pig." And that kind of thing. Or let's look at the conditions under which this plant is going to produce more sugar, for example. We could do those kinds of things but once we got things like PCR for example and once we got access to the databases, we could just do a lot more interesting things in the classes. The students could participate in doing it and that's what was really fun.
Harris: Yeah. Continuing on with that theme of going from--well, there is still physical stuff like dissection--but more technology-based research...
Dr. Clark: What did you think was fun in your science class?
Harris: Well, I thought was fun was the feeling of accomplishment when I can figure something out. I know how something works. Because it would give me a lot of trouble when I couldn't wrap my head around it. I had to study and examine it more and it's like "oh! This is how this system works, these are the inputs, outputs, how it functions, and the enzymes and all that." Finally getting it, that a-ha moment is what I've enjoyed about science. Finally figuring something out.
Dr. Clark: Yes, I love that too.
Harris: Because science can really kick my butt with its terminology and how things work. All the intricacies and its elaborate design. But, you know, that's just how it is.
Dr. Clark: Well, that's true. I was talking to a friend recently, it was Chitra, Dr. C. She's on a search committee for an English person. We were talking about how different professional language is in those two different disciplines. You probably see some of that too since you switched over to the English major. That each discipline has its own language and of course science is really heavy in terminology. I mean I bet you learn like 500 words or something like that during a science class that you never heard of before. And it's hard! Yet, you have that same kind of thing in your area as well.
Harris: It's true. Every major has its own difficulties and struggles. Going to kind of the same topic of the laboratories, experiments, and whatnot. I know that worked on your Second Life program that had a virtual laboratory environment called Genome Island. Can you tell me a little more about the inception of that project and how you think that will evolve in the future if it will at all?
Dr. Clark: Well, I hope it will. I hope it isn't going to go away after next year when I stop teaching classes, maybe. How I got into it was that my husband was a computer programmer and he liked to play video games. I would be working on something and I'd look over and he'd be running around killing wolves. "What are you doing?" well, he said, "I'm playing World of Warcraft." I sorta didn't get it, he says "sometime when you have some time, we'll play together." So, one summer I wasn't teaching and I said "Ok, let's play World of Warcraft this summer." So we did that, we played that together and I got totally sucked into it. It was such a compelling environment and it was the whole idea of you have quests and you have tasks to do, you have to go here and you have to go there. One of the things that actually helped was my sense of direction because I totally get lost so easily, I get lost in the science building. Walking around in those virtual environments actually made me better at navigating in real life! Anyway, I thought that was such a wonderful learning environment because I had to learn all this stuff, I was going online, doing quests and I was like this would be a great place to teach science! Of course, within World of Warcraft itself, there wasn't a lot really related to science. Business, yes, sociology, yes, a lot of similar disciplines could probably work very well within that environment itself. There wasn't anything science-y within it. A couple of years later, a friend told me about Second Life. I say "oh, let's check that out. Oh, you can build things here! You can make things here! I can make labs here! I can teach here!" So, I did. I built the island and I built some of the stuff that's in the tower now. I couldn't use it for teaching for at least 2 years because none of the university computers could run the viewer or the program. They weren't good enough to run the program. When they finally got good enough to run the program then I moved the non-major course I had recently put online, as an online course, and I redesigned it to work within Second Life and I've been teaching that non-major course ever since.
Harris: Excellent, alright, it sounds like a...
Dr. Clark: It's my favorite place to teach! We actually got a lot of new visitors when COVID hit because people were looking for places to do virtual labs. There were a lot of virtual labs, not just mine, there were a lot of virtual labs in other places around Second Life. So, a lot of people were coming in. Then we got undercut by Zoom, Teams, and Collaborate, things like that. I still think it's a great place because of the sense of presence there is so good. I mean, it's pretty good here, us talking to each other. For one-on-one, this kind of thing is excellent. But for a larger group, the sense of presence is not so strong. But when you have a bunch of avatars sitting around, they look like little people. You have a real sense of being in a classroom. I got a woman in my class from Venezuela! And yet, she is just like everybody else in the class. She has the same access to everything everybody else does. It's terrific.
Harris: I definitely see your work with Genome Island as the capstone of that era, of 1990 to 2009. What you were building toward with the increase in technology and the relation to the genomes and the exciting change of mapping everything out. I think that's where it would lead. I think that's a good place to end the interview. Is that connection between those two.