Educational Programs
2015-2017
Hall of Natural History Interpretive Guide, Georgia Southern University Museum
While working as the education graduate assistant at the Georgia Southern University Museum, I developed an interpretive guide for the Hall of Natural History Exhibit. The exhibit covers the natural history of Georgia's Coastal Plain from the Paleozoic Era through the Pleistocene Epoch. There are many fossils on display, including two mounts: Georgiacetus vogtlensis and a 25-foot mosasaur.
The purpose of the interpretive guide was to provide the museum's student docents with the information necessary to engage with the walk-in visitors. Very few of the students docents had any background in paleontology or geology. The interpretive guide was their resource for background and historic information on each of the fossils in the exhibit.
Click cover image to view an excerpt.
2015-2017
School Group Tour Programs,
Georgia Southern University Museum
While working as the Education Coordinator at the Georgia Southern University Museum, I wrote and updated several school group tour programs. All of our tour programs reflected current Georgia Performance Standards (the state's core educational standards for kindergarten through high school) and were designed to reinforce the curriculum taught in the classroom. This was a unique challenge because of the range of students' ages and grades served by the museum: Pre-K through college. Each tour program targeted specific GPS standards and had activities appropriate for the corresponding age. My goal was also to have some sort of hands-on interaction as part of each tour program. Tour program content ranged from dinosaurs to Native Americans to current events, history to science, and everything in between!
I especially loved serving as the museum's education coordinator because it exposed me to content areas and methodologies I never would have thought to delve into on my own. For example, I learned a great deal about paleontology and archaeology, particularly as they applied to Georgia's Coastal Plain.
2015-2017
Teacher's Guides for Museum Exhibits,
Georgia Southern University Museum
Each exhibit and tour program at the Georgia Southern Museum had a corresponding teacher's guide to aid teachers in preparing for their visit to the museum and front-load content knowledge for their students. These were a lot of fun to write because they allowed me to pull from my own experience as a classroom teacher.
Click image to view the teacher's guide for World War I: Georgia's War, a rotating exhibit that focuses on Georgia's role in the Great War.