Interview with Dr. Dourte

By: Yastika Singh

I had the amazing opportunity to interview Dr. LeAnn Dourte, a professor in the Bioengineering Department at Penn (and my current professor!) about her background in biomechanics, her unique teaching philosophy, and her challenges as a woman in engineering. Dr. Dourte teaches BE 2000 (Biomechanics), BE 2700 (Bioengineering Lab Principles), and BE 5700 (Biomechatronics). Read below about her fascinating work on active learning and her sound advice.

career trajectory, her experiences teaching active learning, her insights into 

Key Points:

• Learning by doing: Dr. Dourte specializes in active learning education, with an emphasis on hands on learning

• Dr. Dourte’s current personal mantra: “it’s okay to say no”

• Biggest piece of advice: there is no rush. “You have time to change your mind, you have time to make decisions.”

We can start with just a little bit of an introduction and a little bit of background as well. Cool. So I'll go all the way back. So, I actually have an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, which I got from Lafayette College, which was an undergraduate only institution. There were no grad students at all. And then when I graduated from there, I was kind of sick of the applications of mechanical engineering. And so I was more interested in applying them to the body. So I did a PhD actually here at Penn in bioengineering. And when I finished that very long period of my life, I kind of decided that research was not actually what I wanted to focus on. I think a lot of that was influenced by my undergraduate education because it was undergraduate only, the interactions I had with my faculty were very different than you have at some larger institutions. And so I was really interested in teaching at the college level. And so that kind of led me down this path into a teaching focused career, and so I've now been teaching at Penn, I think this is my 14th year, and I'm in, like I said, a teaching focused role. 

So at Penn, that's either a lecturer or in my case, I'm in something called the practice track. So my official title is a Practice Associate professor, but really just means that my interests are pedagogical. So when I do research, it's about the best practices in the classroom or trying to increase, you know, inclusive practices, how to make sure everybody is feeling engaged in the classroom. And so that's kind of my path. 

As a woman, did you face any challenges being in engineering during school in your career? And how did you face those challenges? 

For me, I think the biggest challenge has always been how to handle microaggressions. When I was in school, as a mechanical engineer, it was a small class. There were 42 of us. There were four women. So it was just kind of this mind shift for me that I had to stop thinking about it. I had to stop overanalyzing it. But throughout my career, there's always been this: why are they asking me to do something, whether that's taking notes at a meeting or being the person to order food. You want to be a team player, right? You want to be someone that does their job and is helpful. But I think there's always that part of me that in the back of my head, I'm going, are you asking me this because I'm a woman or because everybody took a turn and now it’s my turn? And sometimes the answer is, quite honestly, no, it's your turn. That's okay. Now, bioengineering is less male dominant, right? So even in our undergraduates, we actually have more women than men. Yes. But that's extremely unusual. When you look at our faculty profile, we certainly have more men than women, although we are certainly increasing that number. We're definitely seeing that go up. But most of my career, I think, always in the back of my head, I've asked myself that. And I think I've been very fortunate that there haven't been any large instances of things that I think that have been challenges for me, but it's just that constant doubt in the back of my head of like, how should I react to this? And I think some of that becomes less of a nagging thought the longer you're in a place, right? I know all my colleagues really well at this point. So that helps. But if I were ever to go somewhere new, I think that would all start up again. You know, just kind of that constant getting to know people and getting to know what their reaction is. 

I also think personally, people have told me, I look younger than I am. And while certainly at this point of my career, that's not as true. When I was starting out, I was, you know, in my late 20s, and I was teaching undergraduates. And there was also kind of an age thing that I didn't always feel like I was getting the respect from my colleagues and my students because I looked like a student. Again, obviously, the older I get, the less of an issue that is. But I think that was kind of another challenge for me that was tied to being a woman, although it's a little bit different because it's age-based. So just always that: how do I present myself in a way to be taken seriously? It's very real. 

What kinds of classes do you teach, content wise? 

Sure. So, I teach the sophomore lab BE 2700, which is a required sophomore lab. It's the first full lab in our curriculum. I made this course from scratch, I don't know, four years ago. I was told to cover everything they had so far up to sophomore year. I was like, whoa, that's a lot. So I wanted to tie in biomechanics and biomaterials, because those are our main BE courses in the sophomore year from a content perspective. And then also I wanted to think about skills that I wanted our students to develop. So we actually cover a lot of Arduino material in that course, as well as fabrication and prototyping, so we'll actually use the laser cutter, get those hands-on skills, because those are important, not only in junior year labs, but I think it helps students decide a little bit on what branch a bioengineering they might want to go into. So that's a sophomore lab. And then I also teach a graduate level course, BE 5700. It's no coincidence that it's a similar number. We do, again, a lot of Arduino and prototyping, that is a biomechatronics class. And so that's essentially how do you combine mechanical engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering, right? So it's kind of all those together. So a lot of people think of that as like medical robotics. That's just one example, but a lot of medical devices fall in that category. And so that's also a lab-based course. We build stuff, we deal with biological signals and the trouble with biological signals is they're hard to work with. And so that's my other lab course.

So obviously I'm in your class, so I know that you have a very unique style of teaching, with an emphasis on active learning. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, how you developed that teaching philosophy and how you see the benefits of it in the classroom. 

Sure. Again, given that I have this teaching role, it means that I have a bit more time and energy to focus on best practices in the classroom. And there's kind of this reality that K-12 education is light years ahead of us, right? Like, if you think about the way you were taught in high school, not to say that it's not like a traditional lecture in high school, but there tends to be a lot more interaction with students in the way that students are approached, even like dumb stuff, like a Smart Board. We don't use Smart Boards in college. So education, the K-12 space is done a little differently. And I was interested in learning what best practices we saw in the K-12 space that could easily be translated and make sense in engineering. And interestingly, my first few years at Penn, I taught a lab course, and I like to say that the lab course is the ultimate active learning experience, right? You are learning by doing whatever it is that you're doing. And I wanted to bring that into the classroom and into this lecture type scenario. 

In 2013 or 2014, I actually ran a pedagogical study, in which I did some assessment the last time I ever taught this class in a purely lecture format. I had students talk about not only their understanding of the material, so there are certainly benefits that I've seen- just students are able to understand the material a little better, but also like how connected they felt to their peers and how connected they feel to the field as a whole. You know, how welcoming the environment is,  is this something you want to stay in? And so I did those surveys and assessments in a purely lecture based format. And then what I actually did is I asked myself, when I look at the whole class, right, all the content, where are my students getting stuck? Where are they missing the concepts? Where are they getting frustrated? Where am I not seeing the connections between they're just in the math and I want them to realize that engineering happens in the real world? You actually have to do your designs and make things work. And so I made a big list of all of those things. And I said, are there better ways that we can approach this? 

And so active learning was something, like I said, that's been done for a very long time. It used to be done mainly in a flipped classroom format. The idea being that, you know, everything is online and you only practice in the classroom. That was a little extreme for me. I wasn’t quite able to handle that. Mainly because I think students have enough to do outside of class already. And so I kind of picked these things that I thought my students were struggling with. And, you know, tried to come up with ways to get them to practice with each other, to practice with me and try to connect math and physical reality. And I redid that entire assessment. And interestingly, while I saw increased conceptual understanding, right, I saw that it's very, very hard to look at grades. It's very hard to say, this class’s grades were better than this class because the exams are different, right? It's just hard to do. 

So, conceptually, yes, there were improvements. But what was such a big deal to me were the comments about how I didn't feel like I was the only one lost. I didn't feel like, you know, I was alone in this. My classmate explained it in a way that I finally understood. Right? So just like this coming together of students and, like, actually using other students both in terms of confidence in your field, but also just learning things. That was a really big deal to me. That was something that I thought was really important, especially at the sophomore level. And I stuck with it ever since. You know, I was like, this is it. This is how I want to do this. That has really kind of spread across Penn's campus. Everybody does it a little differently. But yeah, that's what's worked for me and I do that actually in all my lecture classes. 

What's the coolest project that you've worked on? 

So I actually think again, research is defined very loosely for me. You know, a lot of the stuff I do is about improving our curriculum or  I help create actually all our active learning spaces in engineering. So we have quite a few of them, especially now that we have Amy Gutmann Hall up. I get to help design those rooms, which is kind of fun. That's interesting. I like the whiteboards and multiple cameras and, you know, like, what kind of tables, you know, as silly as it sounds, you know, do you want round tables or ovals or trapezoids, like stuff like that. So those have been a lot of fun to work on and kind of give a faculty perspective of how those classrooms are used. I think I have the most fun coming up with labs right now in biomechatronics. Our final project is the students have to design and fabricate a gripper arm that can pick an Orbee up automatically. So meaning that the gripper arm starts closing and you don't get to tell it when to stop. It has to automatically know when to stop without completely smashing it. We make a good mess. But those are probably my favorite projects. It is like actually making these labs that the students will do. Because I get to do them first!

Do you have a mantra that you tell yourself to keep a positive attitude? 

My current mantra is sometimes it's okay to say no. I think that, especially as a woman, I think that we struggle with that. I think that's a hard thing to do. You know, we want to say yes to things. We want to seem like we're participating. And there's a reality that you can't do it all. And that doesn't mean you should always say no, right? And that doesn't mean that your gut reaction should be no. But I think something that I constantly need to remind myself is that sometimes it's okay to say no. Sometimes it's better to say no to things. I haven’t entirely mastered that, but I would say that that is my current mantra for a better life and more productivity. 

What is a piece of advice you'd give to someone considering a career in bioengineering or engineering in general or maybe academia specifically? 

I think a general piece of advice is for any career you're going to go into, is you have time to change your mind, you have time to make decisions. It doesn't have to be done now. I think when I look back over my career, I sometimes feel like I was in a rush to do things. I was in a rush to get a new position. I was in a rush to graduate. I was in a rush, you know, to whatever the next thing was. And with the benefit of being able to look back, sometimes I wish I had spent more time exploring or more time saying, if this isn't what I want, that's okay, and do something different. I actually find myself to be very unique in that my first job was something that I loved and I want to stay in. I want to do this for the rest of my life. This is the career for me. But I've met a lot of people, right? And I've seen a lot of graduates. And for most people, that's not true. And that's okay. It's scary. But I have seen so many people do it successfully, but they're so stressed about it that I don't think they can always look back and see how successful it was. So I think my biggest piece of advice is that there's no rush. There's no rush to do everything or to do it perfectly the first time. Sometimes you have to do it to find out. That's a great way to end.