Newest Addition to the Ag Ed family: Feature on Jon Seaman

Students working on the Rain Garden
Project!

With the recent amount of people interested on teaching agriculture, events to go to, and meetings with potential students, it is hard trying to find time to organize everything. Jon Seaman (@JonSeamanAgEd), a Penn State graduate from 2007, has been hired to facilitate and run a lot of the programs that the Agricultural Extension and Education major has to offer, which includes, watching over the recent cohort of student teachers, looking over the Teach Ag! Avenger team, and much more!

Some students actually were allowed to run the machinery
for the garden project!

Mr. Seaman was a teacher before he came to PSU which allows us to get his personal insight on what we could do better  as teachers. He taught for 5 years at the Chambersburg Area Senior High School as an agriculture teacher and then at the Chambersburg Area Career Magnet School as applied STEM. During his times at both of those schools, he had his students rolling out several hands on assignments that gave them experiential learning! During his time there, he applied for several grants to help his school programs. He received a $5,000 grant from PA DEP to help support his schools community rain garden. He also received a $10,000 grant from the PA DEP again and used that money to install a 3,000 sq. ft. living roof on a portion of the high school. That project required to have the kids take over 21 tons of engineered soil up three stories one wheelbarrow at a time. All of the hard work and determination that the students had made the project amazing.

Students still working on the project!

By coming to Penn State, Jon is bringing all of his big dreams and plans to the college. In some short goals that he listed, he wants to establish a cross- curricular network of partners within the university as well as continuing to meet new students and build relationships with them. Looking into the future even more, he wants to get agricultural educators excited and trained to incorporate STEM, nanotechnology, and robotics, into their curriculum to keep agricultural education competitive with other curricular content areas.

With some many awesome goals and plans for the future, we are so happy to have Mr. Seaman at State College! If you ever want to stop by and say hello to Mr. Seaman (which he highly encourages!) his office is in 206 Ferguson!

To learn more about starting on the path to having a career that makes a positive impact on the lives of students across the globe by becoming an agricultural educator, please contact the agricultural teacher education program at teachag@psu.edu. Follow us on Twitter at TeachAgPSU, on Facebook, or on our blog!

Olivia Murphy-Sweet
Student Blogger
Teach Ag! Avenger
Twitter Handle @OSweetMurph
2016 Agricultural Education Student Teacher