Dr Angela Ziebell

I have project management and customer management experience working with industry, research institutes, government bodies and academia in the US (2007-2013) and Australia.  Originally used to manage multi-million dollar projects and tens of thousands of samples a year, I now use these skills in the Higher Education sector to bridge the gap between academia and the external employers where most of our graduates are destined. A number of challenging roles have helped me learn how to keep stakeholders satisfied while keeping plans, objectives and co-workers on track. Understanding how systems and people work helps immensely working in higher education.

I specialise in redevelopment of curriculum or the building and introduction of new subjects. Having just moved to Deakin I am keen to contribute to the Chemistry teaching while helping with the development of work linked learning and Indigenous Science in the curriculum of the School of Life and Environmental Sciences. In my last role, I coordinated two internship units that run year-round and "Career skills for Scientists" that runs twice a year. I also lead the introduction of an Indigenous Science unit and I was the first Indigenous Engagement Champion for the Faculty of Science at Monash. My research centres around the impact of career and employability education on undergraduate science students.

For 2016-18 I led a redevelopment program for Monash Chemistry's laboratory activities. "Transforming Laboratory Learning" brings Work Integrated Learning into 17 lab classes by working directly with industry to build context and inquiry into activities, better preparing students for the workplace. Authentic assessments such as executive summaries and QC reports are now used for learning and assessment alongside more traditional formats.

My technical experience includes designing and optimising high through-put chemical and biochemical assays, biomass analysis, natural product isolation, and structure determination, as well as organic synthesis. I have successfully worked with a large range of professionals from programmers to accountants, chemical engineers to plant geneticists.

Higher education learning and teaching for STEM students. Especially using industry/workplace contexts for learning and career readiness.

The move from STEM student to new graduate.

Transferable skills learning and teaching including cultural competency.

How mainstream science students experience learning about Indigenous Science. 

How to prepare educators to teach Indigenous Science.

Royal Australian Chemical Institute. 

Career learning for Science students

Work Integrated Learning

Chemistry

SLE155

Work Integrated learning, Career development learning, Laboratory learning, WIL in the laboratory classroom, Embedding Indigenous perspectives in Science curricular, Biomass utilissation, Biomass for biofuels, Biomass characterisation

The Australian Council of the Deans of Science - Indigenous Science for tertiary educators website creator and manager. 

Indigenous wisdom and knowledge leading in the way in new Monash University Science course. 

Higher Education Academy Senior Fellowship

Career development learning

Due to the generic nature of the Science degree in many parts of the world, science students are not directly linked into their profession while studying (unlike courses like teaching and health). This can result in a poor understanding of workplaces which can be challenging for institutions to address. Afterall which workplaces do the students need to learn about? Where will the students end up? Placements can make a huge difference but issues of scale and equity (if placements are unpaid) mean that other complementary approaches are needed. In-curricular career development learning which is contextualised for science students is one option. We are looking at the impact of a unit which was designed specifically to fill known gaps in student knowledge. WE are looking at self-perceived changes across the unit and measurable differences to the Graduate Outcome Survery for those same students one and three years post-graduation.

Tolerance of Ambiguity

One very important facet of learning and teaching is the extent to which their students will tolerate uncertainty. The ability to tolerate uncertainty as a personality variable was first identified by Budner (1962) who described an individual’s tendency to see ambiguous or uncertain situations as either desirable or as a threat. Further to this, uncertainty tolerance (UT) is a psychological construct referring to the way an individual(s) perceive(s) and process(es) information about ambiguous situations or stimuli when confronted by an array of unfamiliar, complex, or incongruent clues. Tolerance of uncertainty is now recognised as being an important determinant of an individual’s ability to function successfully in both the class room and the workplace. We are looking at how high achieving educators manage ambiguity in the classroom and what we can learnfrom them about helping students see ambiguity as part of the way systems work as opposed to a negative. 

Indigenous cultural competency before and after studying an introduction to Indigenous Science.

We look at the impact of studying a semester long unit on the Indigenous cultural competency of science students in an for-credit eective. Using Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews Indigenous Graduate Attribute evaluation instrument we are looking at students perceptions and beliefs before and after the unit to determine, first where these students start, and then what the impact of the learning is. This work is incredibly important as poor attempts to introduce Indigenous perpectives and content, can lead to the use of sterotypes by educators and actually decrease cultural competency.