When I was planning the activity I wished to carry out during my time as a teaching assistant, I kept coming back to the idea of leading a field trip. The Urban Farm is a really unique class that values the hands-on component of learning, teaching students to get down in the dirt and look at things up close in order to understand them. I wanted to draw on that idea by introducing students to an urban agricultural space that is uniquely built and uniquely motivated, which led me to a field trip to the Beacon Food Forest. This field trip, alongside the broader work of acting as a teaching assistant, gave me the opportunity to interact with students in ways that strengthened my connections to the land and to the university community.
Since my final quarter of freshman year, I have been drawn to learning about and working in sustainable agriculture and food systems. This experiential learning project was relevant to my future goals because it helped me to understand how ideas about sustainability can be communicated to others, and how teaching can be a reciprocal relationship. After I graduate from the UW, I plan to continue on to a graduate degree, where I am certain I will again work as a teaching assistant. I am glad I have this experience to serve as a sort of background to jump off of in the future.
I spent my TA-ship working with Eli Wheat, a professor in the Program on the Environment. I have been incredibly fortunate and deeply thankful to look to Eli as a mentor over the course of my undergraduate career, and working with him during spring quarter only strengthened that relationship. I will continue to work with him over the summer quarter, not as a TA but as an intern completing my capstone project on his farm. Building a professional relationship with Eli through my job as a teaching assistant and beyond that, I feel I have been well supported and aided in my pursuit of work and study in food systems. Eli has helped me to shape my goals and projects throughout my time as an Environmental Studies student, and I am delighted that he has agreed to continue working with me as a capstone supervisor.
Working as a teaching assistant for the Urban Farm class was a unique and incredibly rewarding experience for me, possibly one of the most valuable of my undergraduate career. When I began the Spring 2019 quarter, I was excited and anxious about what the class would hold: What would our students be like? How would they respond to the goals of the class? Would they be as excited about farming as we (the instructors) are? Fortunately, our students went above and beyond in terms of meeting our expectations. I felt really lucky to spend two days a week in a classroom full of people who were as interested in learning about growing food as we were in teaching it. Not only that, but the entire teaching team was incredibly supportive and made my Tuesdays and Thursdays an absolute delight. I am so glad I was able to do this project, and I look forward to continuing this work in the future.