Hi! My name is Alli Shinn, and I am a Senior Environmental Studies and Geology major. This semester I have had the incredible opportunity to work with the Tri-State Steelheaders Salmon in Schools program. The Salmon in Schools program is an environmental education program that partners with about 20 schools across the Walla Walla Valley. Each classroom that we partner with receives a fish tank that is stocked with Coho Salmon eggs from a nearby hatchery, these tanks will remain in the classrooms for the entire school year and by May the salmon will be large enough to release. In addition to getting the fish, each classroom also receives a monthly lesson about some topic related to salmon, conservation, or environmental protection. This semester my primary role in the fellowship is going into our classrooms to teach our monthly lessons, sometimes as the supporting teacher and other times as the lead. We work with a wide range of ages so on some days we are teaching about cell biology to highschoolers and on others we are talking about the salmon life cycle with preschoolers. I think that this variety of students is one of the best parts of the job! Each student brings a different background, has a different style of learning, and is interested in different things. Trying to tailor my teaching to support every student is quite the challenge and has taught me a lot about thinking on my feet.
Alli and co-workers
In addition to teaching in our classrooms I am also working on a longer-term project to establish a volunteer base for the Salmon in Schools program. Although this year The Steelheaders have both an intern and a fellow, the education arm of the organization is only a one-person operation. With at least twenty schools and hopes to continue expanding the Salmon in Schools program, one of my goals is to find ways to reduce some of the workload of the program’s manager so that he can focus on curriculum building and outreach efforts. One of the ideas that I had to help meet this goal is to create a “salmon club” where some of our middle and high school students will be responsible for tasks like tank maintenance and water changes. I am currently in the process of creating the curriculum resources for the salmon club and hope to begin recruiting and training students at the start of next semester. Things like the salmon club are just one example of the ways that my fellowship has given me both structure and independence, and I am so excited to see how that continues into next semester.
Experiences like Alli’s are made possible by the Whitman Community Fellow Program, which allows organizations of the Walla Walla Valley region to apply for the opportunity to create an unpaid, part-time fellowship addressing some of the area’s social, economic and cultural challenges. To learn how you could become involved, contact us at ccec_info@whitman.edu.