Typically, the Kenans Fellow fellowships are awarded to science teachers, but this year, they were looking to cultivate interdisciplinary teams, so that opened the door for me to apply and, ultimately, have this awesome opportunity.  I am looking forward to the coming year and all that it means to be a Kenan Fellow and to learn how to be a part of Citizen Science.

Currently, I am a seventh grade math teacher at Chinquapin Elementary School, which is located in a very rural area in Duplin County.  My goal as a Kenan Fellow is to foster relationships with other educators and members of the science community in order to impact education in a positive and creative way.  As part of this collaborative process, I hope to create an engaging interdisciplinary unit that I can use in my classroom which uses camera traps and the data collected from them. Because I also have experience as an art teacher and have taught all content areas previously as a 6th grade teacher, I hope to create lessons that are integrated and provide students with dynamic, authentic learning experiences.  As we incorporate the lessons over the next year, I also hope to continue to collaborate with my Kenan Fellows team and to provide opportunities for our students to share the data they collect with other students across the state.  After we have implemented and revised our lesson plans, our team will share the lesson plans with other teachers at a professional conference so that they can also discover how to be a part of Citizen Science and share it with their students.

The eMammal Post Doc, Stephanie Schuttler, makes an adjustment to a camera trap as she explains how to set-up the cameras to collect data.