Dr Sally Faulkner

Teaching

I am part of the universities Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL) advisory board. I am a big advocate for student engagement, peer learning and sense of community. PLTL is a teaching method that utilises near-peers to facilitate workshops that are an integral part of the course. These workshops are meant to add-on to any contact hours with academic staff members and are not a replacement for seminars/tutorials.

The PLTL workshops aim to boost student confidence and create a sense of community as the workshops of 8-12 people stay the same throughout the semester. Students are also able to feel more comfortable with a near-peer and can construct their thoughts better and enhance their learning in the “zone of proximal development”. In this way, PLTL aims to boost student outcomes, reduce attainment gaps, improve retention and increase students’ sense of belonging.

Peer leaders delivering the workshops get training and are coached/supported throughout the process. This gives them various transferrable skills and enables them to develop a deeper professional relationship with staff members. They are also rewarded with multiple recognitions on their HEAR transcript. Students benefit by having regular contact with a near-peer who was in the same position very recently and most students who engage with PLTL outperform their peers who did not. Staff benefit as students will be more engaged in the module content and have a deeper understanding of the topic.

Undergraduate Teaching

• Evolution (BIO113)
• Research Methods and Communication I (BIO209)
• Research Methods and Communication II (BIO309)
• Project Skills in the Life Sciences (BIO603)
• Behavioural Ecology (BIO311)
• Essential Skills for Biologists (BIO100)
• Diversity and Ecology (SEF033)

Research

Research Interests:

My work focuses on Geographic profiling (GP) and its use in conservation biology. GP was developed originally to solve the problem of information overload when dealing with cases of serial crime. It uses spatial data relating to the locations of connected crimes to prioritise the search for the criminal’s anchor point (usually a home), and it is extremely successful in this field. Previous work has shown how the same approach can be adapted to fields such as animal foraging, invasion biology and epidemiology. Despite the success of GP in a range of disparate fields within biology, the model’s application has to date largely ignored a great deal of spatial complexity and differences in habitat, many of which are likely to be important. The overall aim of my research is to further look at applying GP methods to ecological and conservation data sets, whilst developing the mathematics of the model and examining whether the combination of GP and GIS data can be used as a practical tool in the field to better inform conservation management plans. 

My key interests are wildlife crime, such as poaching, human-wildlife conflict and the illegal wildlife trade. 

Publications

View Dr Faulkner's Google Scholar