I’m just over two weeks into my experience at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences and this has truly been a career and life changing experience! (I think I have said that 1 million times in the past two weeks!) We are working hard to create lessons and protocols that any teacher can use, regardless of experience, time, or funding. We have also been creating videos that teachers can access to make the processes that we discuss in our lessons easy to follow. Literally, anything that usually holds us back from using a lesson online has been discussed and addressed so we can have as many teachers participating in our citizen science projects as we can!

As a part of the Kenan Fellowship process, one of the major components is our relationship with our postdoc. Dr. Julia Stevens has put trust into #TeamDirt that we will develop the protocol and lessons that will broaden her research data collection to other classrooms throughout the state and country. One thing that impresses me about Dr. Stevens is her desire to bring real science into the classroom and to the public as a whole. For us, she is the link between the “science world” and the classroom. For her, we are providing crucial data that she will be using to formulate conclusions and next steps within her overall dandelion research.

I believe that this relationship with a current, practicing scientist is what sets us apart from other teachers because we have been walked through scientific processes with someone who does these things on a daily basis. However, the fact that we are trying to make our experience as accessible as possible will help bridge the opportunity gap to a point that other teachers can produce and contribute data that is comparable to ours. I would say that is the ultimate, shared goal between both the Kenan Fellows on the project and Julia as the scientific researcher.