E ric T. Saliim didn’t mean to become a college professor.
In 1999 he was working as a toxicologist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, when he noticed that interns who came to his lab from his alma mater, North Carolina Central University, struggled with basic scientific tasks. “If I would say, ‘I need a five-molar solution,’ it would puzzle them,” Mr. Saliim says, referring to a common laboratory measure of dilution. “They would just kind of stand there. A lot of things that we thought they would be up to speed on, they really weren’t — general laboratory-prep things, laboratory calculations.”
“It was really kind of a drag on the work that we’re trying to do,” he says. “That led me to say, ‘I need to call Central.’ " Amal Abu-Shakra, a biology professor who had been his mentor at the historically black university, took him up on his offer to help, and together they organized a seminar to teach skills that the institute’s interns would need when they got to the lab. (Ms. Abu-Shakra died in August.)
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“It kind of snowballed from there,” says Mr. Saliim. His first cohort of interns did well, so the university asked him to repeat the seminar. Eventually it hired him away from the institute. Now he is an adjunct instructor at North Carolina Central and director of its fabrication laboratory, known as the Fab Lab.
His teaching is “consumer driven,” he says. “I try to gauge my audience and their interests and use that as a vehicle to learning.”
He starts by tying what might otherwise seem like abstract course content to everyday issues, like nutrition and public health. “I say to them, ‘Science is in your everyday life, science is something that’s tangible to you. You just don’t understand the science behind what you do, so I’m trying to bring that to light.’
“If you came into my classroom, there might be some music. There might be videos playing. There’s going to probably be a lot of engagement with the students related to subject matter. My class is very dynamic — 10 minutes of this, maybe 20 minutes of this, another 10 minutes of this. We are always in flux. It may look like this is a chaotic place, but we’re learning.”
There might also be students looking at their phones. “A lot of professors are like, No cellphones, no tablets — focus on me,” Mr. Saliim says. Instead, he tells students to get out their devices. “You’re going to use that as your research instrument. This is the topic, these are the objectives I need you to know in relationship to the topic, and we’re going to take about 20 minutes.”
“I try to infuse myself into their everyday lives. I know students are into Instagram or Snapchat, so those things become part of what we’re doing in class.”
“So that’s my class,” he says. “Instead of me saying, ‘Here’s the topic today. Here’s my first slide.’ "
His approach to grading is also unusual. “There are checkpoints. For information-gathering, that assessment is participation. Did you do the work, and did you get the outcome I was looking for?” The next checkpoint might employ a different assessment — a project, perhaps, that might involve a real-world use for what the student learned while gathering information. “It varies based on the student and their interest,” Mr. Saliim says.
If a class he’s teaching is one section of a course also taught by others, he has less leeway, he notes. But even if he’s just substituting for another professor, he can have a big impact, says Nathalie A. Bravo Batista, a biology and chemistry major who is a senior.
She remembers Mr. Saliim’s filling in for a colleague in a microbiology course — “the class everyone fears,” as she calls it.
“Saliim is old, 40-something, but he looks young is the funny thing,” she recalls. (He’s 46.) When he showed up for the class, “he didn’t have a PowerPoint — he just had a marker.
“We were like, Are you really prepared to teach this class? But once he started talking, he didn’t need a PowerPoint. We’re like, This guy is not here to play. He was interacting with the class, making sure we knew the material. That was the only test on which everyone got over a C. It must be the professor, because why this drastic change?”
More recently, Ms. Bravo Batista has worked for Mr. Saliim as an assistant in the Fab Lab, which is, she says, where “any idea you have, you go in there and make it happen.
“If you don’t know how to use a machine, you go to Saliim. He is so open-minded. He is creativity at its finest. You might think it’s the craziest idea ever, and he’s like, ‘I like it! Let’s do it!’ For him, there’s really no boundaries for what you can do.”
M r. Saliim grew up on his grandparents’ farm in southern Virginia, where he was always curious about plants and animals. But he attributes his interest in pursuing a science career to a ninth-grade biology teacher — “I think he was my first black male teacher. Something with him being a black male in science in an academic institution led me to think, Oh, I kind of like this. When I came to Central, there were other scientists, and the world of science opened up to me.”
Now he tries to convey to students that “science is really fun. We don’t wear suits all day. You get to wear jeans and play with things.”
Lately the things he’s playing with are increasingly robotic. “Robotics reminds me of the old shop class — it’s like shop on steroids.” Even though his background is in biology, he says, “I’m understanding that technology is the future, and if I can incorporate technology into biology for students, that will make them even more relevant.”
“A lot of times,” says Mr. Saliim, “particularly with the students that we serve here at our institution, there is this stigma that ‘science is complex, and complexity is something I’m not capable of.’ I’m trying to take the complexity away from science, to make it more engaging for the students so they feel like, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ "
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
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