Faculty Spotlight: Connelly’s Mad Props Bring Science to Life for Nursing Students

“If you have something that’s more familiar, that’s more relaxing,” Connelly explained. “Something that’s not familiar is exciting, but it’s not relaxing. I want my students to feel as relaxed as they possibly can, because I think then, that’s how you can learn.”

When she was preparing a lesson on pseudomonas, she thought of the most famous Mona, Mona Lisa as painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Searching online, she found a reproduction of the image on a bathing suit as well as Mona Lisa herself wearing a bathing suit.

That, she said, fit the bill because pseudomonas is a bacteria, and bacteria usually like a wet environment. “You can get an infection from pseudomonas in a hot tub,” Connelly noted.

Plus, “pseudo” means fake and the images of Mona Lisa, whether in or on a bathing suit, are fake. A former student told her she always remembers that one.

In a previous class on respiration, Connelly brought in a bunch of glass grapes to show what the alveoli, or small air sacs in the lungs, look like. She found that item in a thrift store.

The props change often, year-to-year and on the fly, depending on whether her students seem to understand her quirky connections.

Connelly said she thinks her background might have influenced her penchant for linking unlike things and using unusual props to illustrate the interior world of the human body.

With her father serving as a commander in the United States Navy, the family moved around as she was growing up. When she was trying to learn a new language, like Danish in Denmark or Spanish in Panama, she would try to relate the foreign words to things with which she was familiar.

“We moved around, and I was always being introduced to new things,” she said. “And this isn’t that different.

“It was scary, to always have to go to a new place and new everything,” said Connelly, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada, as does her husband, an orthodontist.

Wherever they lived, her parents instilled the importance of education, she said. They might have been surprised by her choices, but they were supportive nonetheless. She said her mother always told her, “Your education is something that can never be taken away from you.”

When Connelly was considering what she might want to be when she grew up, her father suggested becoming a writer, because she had won a few awards in high school, but she preferred the sciences with reassuring facts that were either right or wrong, she said.

Connelly admitted she “fell into medicine.”

She graduated from McGill University with undergraduate and medical degrees, but she never pursued a specialty and has never practiced. Instead, she found something different that she’s passionate about.

It happened when she answered a newspaper ad for an instructor at a Richmond community college and she fell in love with teaching.

“I have found this is my creative outlet,” Connelly said. “Teaching is my creativity and seeing things in a way that maybe others don’t.”

With some family members being artists, she talked recently about teaching as an art as a guest speaker at a December UVA Health town hall meeting.

“I think that’s what artists do – they create something they see in a certain way, and then they are able to allow others to see it the way they see it,” she said.

Now a mother herself, Connelly saw her son transfer into and graduate from UVA, and now her daughter is a Wahoo.

As the instructor of two biology courses, Connelly sees the nursing students every day, and she can’t help but feel motherly toward them, too, she said. She wants her students to know they can count on her should they need something.

“I’ve taken students to the airport. I’ve taken students to the bank, because they weren’t being treated well. I’ve told them, if you have to go to the hospital …’’ she said. “Some of them are far from home, and their parents wouldn’t be able to get here. I understand.”

Abousy said she thinks Connelly has found the right balance in being a teacher – being there for students and guiding them – and being a “unique and special” person.

“Yes, she’s motherly, but I could also talk with her as a professor, because we developed a relationship with trust,” Abousy said. “I could talk to her about anything. She’s so understanding and reasonable, I could feel vulnerable, and feel safe and comfortable.”

At UVA, Connelly started teaching in the biology department, where the anatomy and physiology lecture course enrolled about 300 students from across Grounds. When the Nursing School wanted its students to have a smaller class, she switched to that school 10 years ago.

She is glad the microbiology course has a mix of students, however, so these future professionals encounter each other on the same level.

“I like it that you have a first-year nursing student sitting next to a fourth-year premed student and they’re getting to know each other before they’re a team in the hospital environment. There can already be this respect for each other,” she said.

Connelly – called “Dr. C” by many of her students – tells her students learning is never a waste of time. She has also learned to disregard people’s sometimes blunt bias in comparing a physician and a teacher, including the salary differential.

“I have been asked, ‘You went through all that education, and you don’t even practice medicine? Isn’t that a waste?’” she said. “But I have all of these students who will be practicing, so it’s not like my knowledge was a waste. It’s going to them.”