Agricultural education is an industry built on connections, and this is made even easier through the resources gathered by agriculture education podcast, Here By The Owl. Co-hosts, Nikki Fideldy-Doll and Breanna Pastir, have spent the past two years developing a network of teachers through their podcast in order to give back to the agriculture education industry.
Fideldy-Doll and Pastir are both agriculture teachers in North Dakota and began the podcast in June of 2020 as a way to connect with their fellow agriculture teachers when conferences were shut down due to the pandemic. This small project quickly grew into a resource used by agriculture teachers to help each other develop stronger teaching methods and improve their agriculture programs.
“Our biggest goal, from the beginning, has been to give back to the ag teachers and so we look for any way we possibly can,” Pastir said. “Obviously, we do that through our episodes, but we’ve done some giveaways. We’ve partnered with Wandering Maverick to give away some awesome ‘Support Ag’ t-shirts to get that out there too.”
The support for the podcast from the agricultural education community has been overwhelmingly positive. Seeing the physical evidence of their efforts helping other agriculture teachers is the fuel that keeps this team pushing forward.
“Sometimes, people will ask a question about something, and there are people out there that are not our friends, we do not know who they are, but they suggest our podcast or an episode that we’ve talked about it, and that’s the best feeling,” Fideldy-Doll said. “It’s because we didn’t solicit that, we didn’t tell that person, ‘Hey share this for us,’ right? They found it helpful, and so they’re sharing it.”
Pastir and Fideldy-Doll work hard to create resources for student teachers and new agriculture teachers to help the entry into this profession become easier and more welcoming to those that are struggling. They actively communicate with agriculture teachers to build a network dedicated to aiding each other and their students.
These two have partnered with companies and organizations to produce effective tools to help agriculture teachers. They continue to work on building relationships with these groups to push more incentive out to others to help the next generation of agriculture educators.