About me
My name is Jenn Davis, and I am a year one Teacher Candidate at the University of Ottawa. This space is a collection of things I am learning in the classroom.
I have wanted to pursue a career in education for a long time and it feels great to be finally doing it. Over the last 15 years I have been living in Montréal and Vermont, working in sustainable development and social enterprise. Most recently I helped create Black Dirt Farm, a closed-loop farm that collects over 30 tons of food scraps a week for feed for laying hens, making compost & worm castings, and using the heat recovered from the compost to warm a greenhouse. Previous to that I developed regional implementation plans to support new food scrap diversion legislation in Vermont. And previous to that, I helped establish the sustainability program at Concordia University. I am strongly motivated towards activism and engagement and have worked on various neighborhood improvement projects, social justice campaigns, and was a field organizer for VT Senator Bernie Sanders. Fostering conditions for personal empowerment and helping myself and others find a sense of agency is central to how I approach the world; an orientation that I think dovetails nicely with education.
When I was at Concordia, my responsibilities included measuring and monitoring campus sustainability and looking for opportunities to reduce our environmental impact and make our operations more socially responsible. The highlight of that work was using the campus as a living laboratory to engage students and staff in problem-based service learning projects that improved the school and offered students rich learning opportunities with real-life problems. Through this approach a great many exciting initiatives came to be including a rooftop greenhouse for interdisciplinary experimentation, an urban farmer training program, a facility for bicycle commuters, an environmental purchasing consortium, an eco-event planning service, and new curriculum was created, while at the same time providing students with the opportunity to apply what they were learning in the classroom, and gain skills in collaboration and problem solving.
