Kate has been educating students for 8 years in a variety of settings and states. After teaching science in a school garden while earning her Environmental Studies degree at UC Santa Cruz, Kate went on to be a naturalist in the Sierra Nevada and then the East Bay Area. Wanting to have more time with students than the weeklong camps and experience a different part of the US, Kate moved to Asheville, North Carolina. There she was an Instructional Aide in special education classes and explored the mountains, rivers, forests, and crags that Appalachia had to offer.
Kate returned to California to earn her MA in Education and Education Specialist credential from Cal Poly. She was lucky to become the Resource Specialist at the same school where she did her student teaching, and ran the Resource Program for 2 years. Loving her time at Baywood Elementary, Kate was still itching to get back into an area where she could easily get into the wilderness and integrate her background in natural history and environmental education in the classroom.
When she is not teaching, you can find Kate running on trails, exploring new wildernesses, racking her brain for the latin name of the plant in front of her, flipping over logs to see what is underneath, or curled up with a good book. In this next year she is excited to get better at skiing, grow roots in North Lake Tahoe, and be part of the communiTEA!
What inspired you to join TEA? I love the opportunity to use experiential learning to grow a sense of belonging to locality while at the same time empowering students to understand and take hold of their potentials. Using placed-based learning and a hands-on approach, TEA takes rigorous state standards and makes them applicable, so students are able to develop real-world problem-solving skills.
Where did you go to school? M.A. in Education, with a Special Education Specialization from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. B.A. in Environmental Studies with a Focus in Environmental Education and Minor in Anthropology from U.C. Santa Cruz
Do you have any special certifications? California Clear Education Specialist Credential, California Assistive Technology Assessment Certification
What is something that not everyone knows about you, but probably should? I know a lot about birds, and I’ve handled a number of raptors through different jobs including Red-Tailed Hawks, a Harris’s Hawk, a Great Horned Owl, a Western Screech Owl, and a Golden Eagle.