Teaching in Qazaqstan
Cardiff University has recently started a campus in Kazakhstan; I spent two weeks there teaching. In this post I’ll discuss some of my experiences.
My time in Astana was two weeks, but this was part of a 5-week delivery of a course called Scientific Thinking, which was designed by Dr. Matt Smith. Matt is an astrophysicist at Cardiff University whose name I had heard of, but whom I’d never quite met until planning started for the Foundation programme that Scientific Thinking is part of.
I don’t want to go into the planning part of this experience too much, mainly because I feel like we were supported quite poorly by Cardiff University and I don’t feel like this post is a good place to go into that in detail. However, I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed working with Matt as I prepared to “cosplay” a physicist in Kazakhstan. Matt put together a really great course.
We started with a week of online teaching. It was nice to meet the class, although it was a pity that the format of the online class made it the “worst” of online delivery: all the students were watching us from a single lecture room rather than logging on individually, which would have let us use techniques and tools that take advantage of online delivery.
After that week of online teaching we all headed to Astana. I have experience of teaching in international environments and so I knew how intense the schedule can be, but I was looking forward to the positivity that comes from interacting with the students.
I was not disappointed on either front. The students were fantastic and I really felt privileged to learn about their lives and experiences. A large proportion of the class were keen to work, explore, and engage. One example of this was on the last day of teaching, when some students wanted to talk about reinforcement learning (which was not at all a topic covered by the course), so we sat down and worked on it together.
The cohort were fun. I look forward to returning to Astana and hope to teach them again.
Everyone who was teaching got the opportunity to give a seminar about their research. I was lucky enough to go and speak to students at another university. Once again I was impressed by the students and enjoyed my brief time with them.
Being in Kazakhstan was not all work: we enjoyed some extracurricular activities with the students. My particular favourite was playing basketball with them. They were all far more skilful, fitter, and faster than any of us, and I love competing against people like that.
You can read about some of that, as well as a number of other aspects of the trip, at this blog that Matt was writing on a daily basis over there.
The support from the team at the Kazakhstan campus was great, we were made to feel welcome and part of the team. We were well taken care of and supported to be able to deliver in our teaching.
One final thing I want to talk about is my colleagues from Cardiff University who were part of the trip. Eamonn and Patrick are two Physics PhD students who were employed to support the teaching. Frankly, they were brilliant and also a bunch of fun. They made cosplaying a physicist as easy as it could be. We were also joined by Dr. Marcus Gomes and Dr. Laura Reynolds, who were teaching another course. I enjoyed sharing my time with them and am appreciative of the fact that they were there. It made the experience really enjoyable. Here we all are at an ice hockey game.
