A Special Summer & Starting Senior Year

Hello everyone!

As I write this, I am spending a quiet evening at my home just outside of State College reflecting on the past week. Week 1 of the semester is already in the books! This is my final semester as a "normal" college student at Penn State, as I will start my student teaching internship shortly after the new year for my final semester as an undergraduate student. Time truly does fly by, and I am doing all I can to soak in this fall semester even though it is one of the busiest seasons of my life so far.

Speaking of student teaching, it is exciting to officially be able to say that I will be heading to Athens Area High School in Bradford County, PA! I am excited to have Mr. Dave Steinfelt as my cooperating teacher, and I will also get to work with Mrs. Sarabeth Alderfer as well throughout my 15 weeks at Athens. From the very first time I visited the program I was impressed with the ways that both Dave and Sarabeth ran a solid program in all aspects that is most evident in their interactions with their students. They both are incredible teachers and advise a rockstar FFA chapter, and it truly is an honor for me to get to work with them as I learn from their example over the coming year. This experience will allow me to experience many new things, such as teaching agricultural mechanics and living in Northern PA. I often get some interesting looks from people when I tell them I am moving almost to New York to student teach, but I am excited to student teach in a supportive environment that will challenge me and allow me to grow as much as possible. I am looking forward to being a Wildcat!

A bit of time has passed since I last posted on this blog, so I wanted to share a few quick highlights from this past summer and a variety of experiences that I take with me into my senior year. When people ask what I did over the summer, I often say that it depended on the week because no two of them were the same! :) Below are just a few highlights from the summer.

Kenya

I was blessed to start my summer in Kenya for three weeks after the spring semester ended through the end of May. I traveled with a small group from Penn State as part of an embedded course called "Issues in Economic, Community, and Agricultural Development in Kenya". This course is part of a long standing partnership between PSU and the Children and Youth Empowerment Centre (CYEC) in Nyeri, Kenya. The CYEC is a home for former street-dwelling children and provides care and support for youth while they go through school and enter adulthood. Dr. Janelle Larson and Dr. Sjoerd Duiker led an incredible experience for our group, and this trip truly was life-changing in many ways for me.

This trip allowed me to bring together my two main interests of education/working with youth and hands-on agriculture, and I learned a great deal! I can't help but smile when I think back to the memories made at the CYEC over our three weeks there. Each day, we would walk with the children to school around 6:00am and spend our evenings with them after they got back from school. We would play games, draw pictures, or play football (soccer) with them most days. We even were able to find volleyball supplies in Nyeri town to build a new volleyball net as their old one had been damaged and stolen some time ago. We went to town to purchase a net and ball, and when we came back there were two trees cut down and ready to be posts for our new court :). Some of my favorite memories include cooking with our chef David in the kitchen and praying with the boys cabin at the end of each day. I miss my Kenyan friends a lot - they hold a special place in my heart!

During the day times, the group from Penn State split off into several project teams. I was on the conservation agriculture team, and we traveled to the CYEC's polytechnic school in Rathithi, which was about 30 minutes away. The staff at the polytechnic had requested our help with building conservation agriculture demonstration plots to help teach farmers in the local community. We created four separate plots in the field and set up an example crop rotation of maize/beans, cabbages, potatoes, and macuna (a kind of cover crop well suited for the Kenyan climate). Cover crops are a novel concept for many farmers in Kenya, so our hope is that this project will increase adoption of practices that can restore desperately needed nutrients to the soil in places where it has been depleted over time.

NACTA Conference - New Mexico

After returning from Kenya, I had the opportunity to travel to the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) Conference held in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I gave a poster presentation related to my thesis research project for the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State that is focused on the research I did during my trip to Nepal in May 2022. The research focuses on Nepalese science teachers and their educational resources through the lens of Asset Based Community Development in which a community's resources can be used to solve challenges. We used a method known as Photovoice, in which the educators captured photos of their resources and described them to us in accompanying descriptive narrations. 

While in New Mexico, I had the chance to travel to White Sands National Park and see the Organ Mountain Range. I also got to learn from faculty members and graduate students at universities across the country conducting research related to agricultural education and effective teaching. I count myself fortunate to have been able to be a part of the PSU crew at NACTA.

Time Spent with Athens

Throughout the summer, I also got to spend some time with Athens FFA and learn to know some of the students I will be teaching this upcoming year. Some of my highlights included spending time with the chapter at PA FFA's State Convention in June, attending the Troy Fair and experiencing some of the livestock shows and sale, and going up to a chapter chicken barbeque fundraiser. I also got to interact with my cooperating teachers and other agricultural educators at the Pennsylvania Association of Agricultural Educators conference in July. Experiences like this make me very excited for January to come so I can spend time with the Athens crew every day!

The Rest

Outside of the main events on my calendar this summer, I enjoyed some time at home with my family and spent a portion of my time in State College. My family took a quick vacation to Acadia National Park in Maine, which was a great time for the four of us to spend time together in the midst of a busy summer (just don't ask us how the hike down the west face of Cadillac Mountain went :) ). My main project was to work on my thesis research, and I made good progress (even though there is still work to be done)! I also continued my internship with the Global Teach Ag Network and helped out with the College of Agricultural Sciences at several events for prospective students and their families, which I enjoy very much. Helping with recruitment events takes me back to my own years in high school with so many questions and uncertainty about the journey ahead...I count myself fortunate to now be a senior who can hopefully help to assure other students that they can find their place here at Penn State too.

Now that this first week is done, we've already spent time planning our first units, practicing surveying and building layout, and teaching lessons to the other members of our Agricultural and Extension Education (AEE) cohort. I think its safe to say this semester will stretch us all, but its also probably safe to say that this is where the growth will occur as we push each other to grow into the best educators we can be for our future students. Although there is a lot about the future that I do not know, what I do know is that I am blessed more than I deserve to be in the place that I'm at with the people I am with. PSU and our small but mighty AEE cohort (there are only 8 of us graduating from our program this year in a university of over 40,000 undergraduate students!) are a community I'm proud to be a part of, and I will look forward to sharing more moments along the way over the coming year.