By Ronica Stromberg
Hannah Miller never considered teaching as a career, but now a naturalist educator at Fontenelle Forest in Bellevue, she has found teaching children about nature to be deeply fulfilling.
“I ended up falling in love with it, and now that's what I'm doing for five and a half years,” she said. “I love it, I'm happy, and I'm not leaving anytime soon.”
Miller graduated with a fisheries and wildlife degree from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2017 with expansive interests outside education. She said that, at that time, she thought the most important work she could do to conserve and protect the Earth’s resources would be to go into research to provide data that could influence policy.
“Now, for me, what I feel is most impactful is having kids come outside and ending up falling in love with being outside, because I see hundreds of kids a year,” she said. “If I can get 10 of them to really fall in love with the outdoors and want to help protect it, that's 10 people that can help make change in their community in the future or advocate for their local park or lead litter cleanups.”
She spends her days at Fontenelle Forest, a 2,100-acre private, nonprofit nature center, researching and preparing lessons plans and teaching 3- to 5-year-olds in her Mudpies program. She leads other programs outside the standard work week, field trips, summer camps and family and adult hikes. Almost all of her work is in education, but she also cares for the turtle shown in programs, manages the center’s bird feeders and helps organize the Christmas bird count in Bellevue.
“One of my favorite parts of the job is that we get to have our hands in so many buckets and get to bounce off on so many topics and lead programs about so many different things,” she said. “It keeps me enriched, and then I, of course, get to dive into little research rabbit holes beforehand and refresh my memory or learn something new.”
Follow the rest of the story at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1320