TETON SCIENCE SCHOOLS

I came into this internship with limited formal experience with childhood education. I’d had jobs before emphasizing teaching - ski instructing children for two winters in Steamboat, CO as well as one season as an interpretive ranger at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska -, but this experience combined elements of those two positions while adding in additional challenges. I began with a clear understanding of how best to connect people with a place or a subject, though I didn’t necessarily carry this concept out flawlessly in practice. I had never practiced creating these connections between resource and audience with children before and never over the course of a whole week. I found myself experimenting with this idea frequently with field groups. How can I make something these students have never seen before relevant to their lives, even after they go back home? For a long time, I felt like this was not a good goal. If students aren’t interested, isn’t that okay? Shouldn’t we meet them where they are, find out what they’re already interested in and help them understand that more? I knew the answer for me was somewhere in the middle - learning couldn’t be forced, but there was still a reason these kids had an instructor. The idea of student-driven vs. student-centered learning was a central concept for me throughout my time at TSS. I began to see the value in introducing students to foreign concepts, and began to find a productive challenge in figuring out how to introduce students to less catchy objects (read: glaciers, rocks, plants, really anything lacking personality) and less catchy objects.

My greatest success with this goal came in an evening program I gave to 4th graders on an “Introduction to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem”. To make the content more interesting, I provided several specimens for the students to examine - pelts, antlers, horns, porcupine quills, waterbottles, scat, etc. - and had them separate these specimens into abiotic, biotic, or cultural categories. The tangible resources allowed the students to get excited about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and brought life to what can be a stale categorization tool, the ABC’s. Safety concerns with porcupine quills aside (in my defense, they do contain a natural antibiotic), the evening was a success and I finally felt like the students wanted to learn in a meaningful way, as they had connected with the specimens and were intrinsically excited about studying them.

It became quickly apparent in my time here that to successfully connect students to the resource, one had to already have a firm understanding of the resource. Being my first time living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, I had a lot to catch up on, and not as much time as I would have liked. My free time was filled with place-based adventures and readings. I still can’t get enough of this, and I mean that in a good way. I believe that understanding a resource from a variety of angles will allow one to uncover possible pathways to connection for a more diverse audience. If you know more, both about the resource and your audience, you are better prepared to find the point that resonates, the point that makes people want to protect the area and their own resources back home. I have a lot more to learn, but I think this winter has provided me with a great background on the GYE that will make me a better educator here in the future. I have sought to share my knowledge of the area with students and people I met while surveying at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort for Search and Rescue, and these students and residents in turn have challenged me to keep learning more with all their questions.

I hope to transfer the skills I have learned surrounding connecting an audience with a resource to future jobs in education. This summer I will be a wildlife ranger at Yellowstone National Park. Though my interactions with individual people will be much briefer than they have been here at TSS, the same learning concepts apply. Give visitors a reason to care. Sometimes the resources speak for themselves - most National Park visitors are naturally in awe of the charismatic megafauna - but most visitors would benefit from more direct information on less personable resources. I believe knowing the content well will inform more meaningful interactions with visitors and in turn gain their support for protecting the earth and all its creatures.