Designing Curriculum & Creative Teaching Materials
Development of the Bobby Lanier Farm Park Curriculum and design of the Dublin Thank Potato campaign
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Bobby Lanier Farm Park
May 2013 - December 2013
While pursuing my Bachelor of Arts at Rhodes College, I served as a special programs intern for the Bobby Lanier Farm Park in Germantown, Tn. My primary focus was to develop farm park curriculum and design print materials for their summer programming. I also co-taught programs and classes at the Farm Park, supported the weekly farmers market, and managed the children's discovery garden.
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This was my first time leading instructional design, and it was a huge learning moment. Through meetings with the Parks & Recreation team, we established summer learning objectives for their summer programming, and I designed classes and sessions to meet those objectives. While I didn't know it yet, I was already embodying the principles of human-centered design, focusing on the needs of young learners and thinking creatively about how to keep them engaged. How to teach vermiculture? Let's talk about worm poop and adopt a worm. Want to convey the importance of rich soil? Let's make a soil recipe. Each week, I learned from what worked well and key challenges from the week before, adapting the material accordingly.
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While reviewing past material can often be cringe-inducing, you can see some of the curricula I developed below. I've learned a lot about effective instructional design since then!
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Urban Farm, Dublin
May - July 2014
I was awarded the Theodore William Eckels International Business Scholarship to work at Urban Farms in Dublin, Ireland in the Summer of 2014.
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During my internship at Urban Farm, a non-profit organization in the heart of Dublin, I worked on the Thank Potato campaign, a Dublin-wide communications effort dedicated to highlighting the diversity of the potato. While working on the campaign, I was tasked with researching and growing over 180 different varieties of potato in up-cycled water cooler bottles that utilized waste stream materials to house and grow the potato plant. These were exhibited throughout the city at pop-up festivals that celebrated the potato’s historical heritage and explained the importance of the potato for food security.
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I designed each of the informational cards and learned a lot in the process about how to craft public experiences that make people take a moment to pause and learn.
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While the information I learned was very useful for communication design initiatives I would later lead, what stuck with me the most was the importance of conserving crop diversity.
I learned that in the 1840’s, Ireland grew a lot of potatoes. The problem was that they grew a disproportionate amount of one kind, the Lumper variety, which happened to be especially susceptible to late blight. So when the late blight hit the country, there was a major crop failure causing millions of people to die from hunger. Had the country grown a more diverse variety of potatoes and not been so over-reliant on one variety, maybe the famine would never have happened. Before working in Dublin, I would have said that crop diversity is important, but after working day after day with different varieties of potato and hearing real stories from Irish families, I realized that crop and seed diversification isn’t important. It’s absolutely necessary, which fueled my desire to work at the Crop Trust in Germany.
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Impact & Learnings
Working for the Farm Park and for Urban Farm Dublin the following summer was the best of both worlds. While leading programming in the Farm Park and working the pop-up festivals in Dublin, I had the opportunity to get my hands in the dirt, educate diverse audiences in fun and creative ways and connect and learn from new and interesting people. While in the parks and rec office and working on the campaign materials, I was able to use my proficiency in the Adobe Suite to create marketing materials, design educational programming, and dive deeper into research. In the Park’s office, I also held meetings with Park staff and teachers, drafted field-trip programming for the park, aided in the organization of events and workshops, and carried out multiple administrative tasks.
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What I loved most about these two experiences was how dynamic they were. My days in the offices working on marketing materials or drafting signage directly correlated to issues that I care about, - just as my work in the field teaching kids the value of sustainable gardening practices or meeting new Irish families throughout Dublin. These two experiences enabled me to couple my love of design, project management, and marketing with sustainable agriculture, food security and education.