Student Forums
A journal of social practice & professional engagement for the Antioch community

Jen Ruud ’18 traveled to the Bahamas to be a part of the exciting work taking place at the Forfar Field Station. The Forfar Field Station exists to educate “students from American high schools and colleges to local Bahamians ­ about the environment using the local ecosystems.” In her time at Forfar, Jen wore many hats from facilitating trips around the island and out to sea, to dive lessons in blue holes, and even carpentry, gardening, and cooking! While initially focused on exploring environmental justice issues, through this experience Jen developed a fascination with teaching and learning. “I love seeing the look in a student’s eye the first time they hold a sea star or the smile on their face the first time we go kayaking,” Jen remarks. And while she never imagined it, her love and desire to pursue a career in education grew with each new, transformative student interaction. Learning by doing. “It’s about wanting to learn geology and oceanography because you saw the tongue of the ocean while scuba diving, not learning about it because your professor assigned that reading,” she states. Antioch has provided Jen the ability to learn beyond traditional methods and to truly immerse herself in experiential learning ­­ an opportunity she hopes to share with others.

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Beth Bridgeman is an associate professor of Cooperative Education. She teaches a series of Reskilling and Resilience courses, exploring seed-resilience, plant medicine, regenerative agriculture and commensality. Her pedagogy includes peer-to-peer teaching within a democratic educational framework. Beth directs cooperative education partnerships in sustainability, environmental science, biomedical science, and alternative education. She is co-op liaison to the science division and to the Japanese language and culture program. A recipient of a faculty excellence award from the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education, she is also an Oral History in the Liberal Arts Faculty Fellow, receiving funding for her project “Re-establishing a Seed Commons through Oral History Methodology” with support from the Mellon Foundation. Her concurrent research, “Pedagogies of Nature: Shinto, Spiritual Ecology, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge” recently received National Endowment for the Arts funding through the Great Lakes College Association.

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