Great Experimentations

By D. Marie Gillispie

It was my junior year at Penn State University, and I needed to make some big decisions. My adviser, knowing my penchant for anxious thought, pulled me in and reviewed locations I could pick to complete my student teaching. She explained to me, “You can teach anywhere in Pennsylvania, England, or in South Dakota. South Dakota is the most challenging, and students either love it or hate it. I have a feeling you are going to choose South Dakota.” She knew me too well.

And so it was. Given the option of going to a foreign country or going to Pierre, South Dakota, by far the more foreign was this small town in South Dakota. I grew up on the metropolitan East Coast in a town outside of Philadelphia called Jenkintown. I was moving to a city with fewer than 14,000 people and as far as I could tell, it was literally the Wild, Wild West.

So the day came, and during the second semester of my senior year, while my friends were heading south to the Orange Bowl, I packed up my things and headed west. I was met at the airport by a huge orange sign that read, “Welcome Hunters!” along with my smiling principal who had moved years before from Pittsburgh to work at the school. As they unloaded our luggage onto the single metal table at the airport, I told my principal that I was amazed at how many people on the plane had musical instruments; they certainly didn’t look like musicians. My city-slicker eyes bulged when she laughed and told me that they were guns. This was only the first new cultural experience that I was to receive during my experience at the Pierre Indian Learning Center (PILC).

I had headed to Pierre with plans of completing my student teaching and then entering the Peace Corps to teach in South Africa. I had always wanted to work with students who truly needed me, and I thought that the Peace Corps was the place to find that. However, upon stepping foot in PILC, I knew that was where I was meant to be. The students come from four different states and 12 different Native American tribes. Close to 80% of PILC students are homeless, and many of them come from situations of abuse, neglect, and/or abandonment. PILC supports students with high emotional needs, and close to half of the students are learning disabled. Students live at the school during the school months, so they not only need a teacher that is dedicated to teaching, but they also need a mentor that will teach them to ice skate on weekends, coach soccer, and eat with them on holidays, because they just want to celebrate holidays like everyone else—with people who love them. I had come to this place with the intent of it being fairly temporary, when suddenly, and most unexpectedly, it became home. I was needed here. And I needed to be here.

Six years later, still at PILC, I was teaching fifth grade and relishing what my job provided. During my summer vacations, I took the opportunity to live and work in remote locations such as on an island in Alaska and at Mesa Verde National Park, bringing back stories and things that I had learned to enhance my classroom. Then one day, I received an amazing email about a graduate program called Earth Expeditions, which was created through Project Dragonfly and hosted by Miami University of Ohio. The program is offered to both educators and professionals in scientific fields to study and conduct research in critical conservation field sites. Around the same time that I was accepted into this amazing program, the middle school science teacher at PILC retired. My life path, once again, seemed to unfold before me and I obediently took my next steps. I simultaneously began teaching middle school science and a Master’s program in science education.

Science was never a passion of mine when I was in school. In fact, I frankly never really liked it. However, I figured that if I could find a way to love science, I could find a way for my students to love science. So during the summer of 2013, I travelled to Belize with my graduate school program to study the conservation of howler monkeys, monitor manatee diets, and investigate human influence on coral reefs. Besides learning about the technical and educational aspects of these topics, I learned that I do love science and have discovered a new-found enthusiasm for all things scientifically related. So to further my studies, and in keeping with my pattern of summers abroad, this past July I traveled to Thailand to study the effects of Buddhism on the environment.

I am also working on efforts to connect myself, and thus my students, with chemistry. I have made strides to accomplish this by participating in a summer internship at Sanford Research in Sioux Falls, SD. In the Sanford laboratory, I worked alongside researchers who are striving to find cures for childhood diseases. For me, this experience not only expanded my scientific knowledge exponentially, but it also brought about an understanding of the symbiotic nature of biology and chemistry. In the lab, I conducted experiments with mixtures and solutions of chemicals that I certainly couldn’t afford to use in my own classroom. This program also partnered with schools to bring in resources and ideas—something PILC has benefited from greatly. Finally, I worked with a team of middle school teachers who spent the summer writing lesson plans that the American Association of Chemistry Teachers have featured on their website. These varied opportunities not only provide innumerable advances to me, but also to the students that I teach.

By no means is this the life I had envisioned: living in a rural town on the plains of South Dakota, teaching Native American students a subject that I originally had no interest in. But life is funny that way. I never dreamed I would be here, but now I can’t imagine being anywhere else

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Photo credit:
Stephanie Noll

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