My name is Laine Augspurger and I am a small town girl from Mahomet, Illinois. Mahomet is a town about 10 minutes from Champaign, where the University of Illinois is located. Mahomet only has one elementary school, so I attended the same school with the same non-diverse population for my entire childhood. I don’t recall much of my science experiences, however the concepts that I do remember were owl pellet dissections and natural disasters and weather-related activities. For example, with the owl pellet dissection–I remember being really opposed to the idea and not wanting anything to do with getting dirty and finding the regurgitated bones of an animal that an owl had eaten prior to our dissection. However, I got a chance to learn more about trying new things and learning about something I had never heard of before. I don’t remember much about the project itself, but I do remember my teacher making it interactively interesting to the point where I still remember to this day how easily she swayed my negative opinions about it and made it fun. Regardless of our diverse-lacking class, our teacher still found a way to make an activity that many girls didn't find appealing to be fun and interesting. 

Once I got to high school, my science experiences became much more memorable than they were in elementary school. I have always thought of science the way I saw it through my earth science class I took my junior year. We studied geology, natural disasters and weather, which was not the greatest experience for me due to my unenthusiastic teacher. The topics were really interesting, but I found it hard to pay attention and the learning wasn’t interesting because of her lack of planning. I took a horticulture class my senior year which introduced me to a whole different type of studying and learning science that I had never had the opportunity to experience in the years before. We studied different types of flowers and trees, as well as learned how to make our own wreaths and bouquets.When learning science became fun and interesting to me, as it did in my horticulture class, it made me realize that it’s all about how the teacher’s teach it rather than the material we are learning about. 

Based on my past experiences in learning science, my learning philosophy stems from hands-on, interactive learning–the kind of learning that I personally benefitted from. I want to be able to instill the same excitement and newfound interest in a topic that they may or may not have initially been excited about learning. I think my background of having both positive and negative experience in the science realm will help me to better understand what young students want to see as they are in the process of building their own personal science autobiographies. I want my students to be able to look back on their experiences and remembering that I taught them in a way that they enjoyed and cherished, regardless if they remembered the exact material I taught them or not. 

I’ve had the experience to practice teaching science in a very informal way through my job at Next Generation School in Champaign over the past few summers. It gave me the chance to do some research in some different cross-curricular areas, science being one of my favorites. In this picture below, I made dirt and worm cups with some of my students and we discussed soil and decomposition while we got to eat a yummy treat. This is the kind of science fun I hope to do with my students in my future classroom one day!