December 2016: Student Spotlight featuring Marie Bouffard

On Journalism

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I am interested in journalism, science, and teaching so I combined these skills and worked as a Residential Educator for FONZ (Friends for the National Zoo). Below is my story.

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As a resident educator I served as camp-counselor for the overnight camp and also as a teacher. The kids ranged in age from going into fifth grade to going into tenth grade so we developed lesson plans for our classes that could be scaled for every age group. I created a lesson on sustainable food systems which looked at where our food comes from, how it’s grown, how we use technology in the agriculture process, and how agriculture interacts and impacts the environment. In class we traced on maps where in the world out favorite foods come from and discussed the pros and cons of eating local, had insightful discussions on the role of technology has in growing our food, looked at the ways agriculture can harm our environment and the exciting ways farmers have developed to work with nature to grow food, and foraged for native edible plants. This class was directly inspired by my education in sustainability at Villanova and particularly a class on sustainable agriculture taught by Dr. Chara Armon which has had a huge impact on my studies.

The directors asked me to teach a class on science writing since that is what I am aiming to do with my education and because they’d never had anything of the sort before. At first I was hesitant as to how I would make a class on science writing fun for middle-schoolers and high-schoolers, (especially since there were very few ideas on the internet!) but it turned out extremely well! When kids first got their class assignments there was some groaning about hating writing but inevitably afterward they each admitted to me that it turned out to be their favorite class of the entire camp! I began the lesson by discussing the two different types of science writing, writing for scientific research journals vs. writing for a science magazine. The kids sorted characteristics on slips of paper into a Venn diagram (made of two hula-hoops) of each type of writing. We then played a game I made up where the kids split into teams where each had a role, scientist, journalist, and artist, where the artist had to draw the “newly discovered organism” I had created based only on the descriptions they received from the ‘journalist’ who heard from the ‘scientist’, the only team member to actually see the organism. The camp was located at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, a satellite campus of the Smithsonian National Zoo located in Northern Virginia where some of the most endangered animals live for breeding and research purposes. SCBI is a magical place, gorgeous landscapes filled with research plots, fascinating people, and of course, endangered animals like kiwis, scimitar-horned oryx, cheetahs, przewalski’s horses, red pandas, clouded leopards, and more. Living at SCBI we got to interact with the zookeepers, researchers, zoo veterinarians, and interns and learn about all the interesting research going on. I was so excited by all the resources at SCBI that I incorporated as much as I could into my lessons. During my sustainable food systems class I took the kids on a driving tour of campus to see some of the related research plots. Seeing research being done on forest biodiversity, invasive plant control, healthy grassland research, and an active apiary, definitely drove home the concepts of healthy and integrated ecosystems that we’d been discussing in class. Then, in my science writing class I taught the kids a lesson on ‘the art of the interview’ and then brought in a zoo vet who was happy to answer all their questions. It was super interesting for me to hear about his work and extremely exciting for the kids, many of them listed it as their favorite class of camp!