Environmental Educator at Growing Gardens

This summer, I will be working as an Environmental Educator at Growing Gardens. Growing Gardens is an educational farm in Boulder, Colorado. I worked at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center’s Summer Camp previously, and wanted to find an experience to grow as an educator in an agricultural setting. My sister is currently living in Boulder for graduate school, so I used the extra bedroom in her apartment as an opportunity to look for summer jobs in the area. 

I am excited to work at Growing Gardens because I believe that I will gain valuable experience to pull from during my student teaching experience in spring 2024. While working there, I will be facilitating agricultural experiential learning, allowing me to apply knowledge gained from my SEED semester—especially the idea of place based learning—and translate it into an agricultural context.

At Penn State, I am minoring in International Agriculture. Within many of the courses I took for this minor, I learned of different approaches to sustainable agriculture around the world. While working at Growing Gardens, I will gain real-time experiences of sustainable practices in agriculture. This will work in part as a capstone to everything I’ve learned from the minor. It will also help me develop a robust curriculum for my future classroom. 

I am also using the opportunity of being in a different state to visit other school-based agriculture education programs and attend Colorado State FFA Convention. It will be interesting to see how school-based agricultural education and FFA differ in other states compared to Pennsylvania.

I am excited to facilitate experiential learning in a new environment, while developing my pedagogy, and building a bank of curriculum to pull from in the future.

This photo is of the Farm at Growing Gardens, Boulder, CO