From her first academic appointment as a Teaching Fellow at Nottingham University to her current role at UWE Bristol, Catherine has been interested in how best to promote deep learning and share the beauty, fascination and creativity of mathematics as a subject with learners. This journey has been informed by many inspirational teachers as well as by the students she has taught.
Seeing learning mathematics as a joint venture between the lecturer and the learners has led Catherine to the use of inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning, such as flipped classroom and problem-based learning. Evaluation indicates that students find her teaching style both stimulating and effective. Sharing her practice has inspired colleagues at UWE and elsewhere to implement flipped teaching, with positive results for student engagement and achievement. Catherine uses technology such as voting systems and Technology Enhanced Active Learning classrooms to enhance the learning experience for students.
Catherine has had a key role in supporting the development of skills for employability through innovative schemes pairing engineering students with student teachers. She has used her national roles within professional bodies to share best practice. Catherine sees research and teaching as equal sides of the academic endeavour and continues to be actively involved in teaching and developing her practice whilst holding management roles. In her current management role, Associate Dean for Research, she supports pedagogic research as an equal partner with discipline-based research. She continues to develop her own teaching, and is looking forward to engaging in a new problem-based learning approach being rolled out across Engineering and Mathematics programmes at UWE.