After my undergraduate work I spent 2 years working as the director of environmental education at the Schrader Envrionemental Education Center in Wheeling, WV. While there I helped create research-infused middle school curricula that reached more than 3500 students, delivered natural history programming, and helped produce outreach materials.
This is a video I filmed and produced of a Red-bellied woodpecker building a nest cavity. It is narrated by naturalist Greg Park.
While there I spent a large portion of my time instructing middle-schoolers (8th grade) in ecological methods ranging from plant community sampling to benthic macroinvertebrate surveys. The program I developed served students from West Virginia and Pennsylvania during my 2 year tenure.
As a graduate student at the University of Nevada Reno, I was part of a collaborative group that organized Nevada’s First National Pollinator Weeks events. As part of that event I presented on Northern Nevada’s Bees.
Most recently my Anne Leonard and I collaborated with the Daugherty Foundation, Sierra Nevada Journeys, and the UNR College of science to give future science teachers a chance to learn about behavioral ecology. As part of the program I led senior undergraduate and masters of education students into the field to make behavioral observations of native pollinators, and brought them into the lab to demonstrate behavioral experiments.
