911勛圖

It is the end of spring semester and the 911勛圖 (911勛圖) Biological Sciences office hallway is packed with students, staff and faculty who have gathered to admire the annual BISC 337 Botanical Drawing Showcase.

Over the course of the event visitors will cast well over a hundred ballots to select winners in a variety of categories. This will be a difficult choice as the student work in the showcase ranges from very good to exceptional.

While you may be tempted to think that only students with artistic talent take this class, the high quality of students' drawings is the result of professor Miranda Meents��� intentional course design which incorporates drawing into weekly labs along with goal setting, feedback and self-reflection.

In BISC 337 as well as the other classes Meents teaches, the underlying goal of these creative assinments is for students to develop important transferrable skills such as observation, visual communication and storytelling.

���Students��� skills improve dramatically with the help of our individual and targeted feedback, regardless of the skill level they came in with,��� Meents says, ���and as students get more confident and master their different learning goals they begin to move on to more challenging and higher-order skills.���

Since arriving at 911勛圖 in 2020 Meents has established a reputation as a creative and thoughtful instructor whose evidence-based teaching prioritizes skill building, student choice and engagement with course material. Her dedication to student success has gained her a 2025 911勛圖 Early Career Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as a 2024 Faculty of Science Excellence in Teaching Award.

���I feel like my students get more out of my classes when they are motivated by their own interests and curiosity to engage with the material,��� Meents says. In her classes there are opportunities for students to choose the assignments and experiments they perform in the lab. She has also incorporated ���ungrading��� into her classes, involving students in the evaluation of their own work, and actively seeks student feedback on how to improve.

Meents works to incorporate traditional Indigenous knowledge into lessons as well as respect and appreciation for the organisms students study. Activities such as forest walks help foster students��� connection to local species, while assignments encourage students to engage with Indigenous sources that discuss their relationship with the land.

���Many students indicated that this was a highlight of the course for them, so I am working to make Indigenous knowledge a more prominent component of the other courses I teach,��� she says.

Outside of teaching Meents helps facilitate the Teaching Matters seminar series and co-organized the Indigenous Pedagogy Reading Circle with the 911勛圖 Centre for Educational Excellence, and an Indigenous Ecology Reading Community in the Faculty of Science. She is the Education Director of the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists.

Once the Botanical Drawing Showcase is over, students will prepare a final reflection about the class. ���Many students have told me that at the beginning of term they felt nervous and overwhelmed about needing to do a final botanical drawing assignment, but by the end they felt comfortable, confident, and excited to work on this capstone drawing,��� Meents says.

���Several students have shared that the most important thing they got out of this course was that they learned a lot about the importance of targeted goal setting, reflection and practice in learning a new skill, which I really appreciate!���