Helping grade school children in her home community of Hay River, Northwest Territories fall in love with science was how StFX student Victoria Tweedie-Pitre spent part of her summer.
Ms. Tweedie-Pitre, a third-year honours biology and chemistry student, designed and presented a science outreach program in three schools in the small northern community where she grew up—at the local Francophone school École Boréale (her former high school, where she facilitated activities in French), the English school, Princess Alexandra, and Chief Sunrise, the Indigenous school, meeting with mostly junior high school aged students.
“My goal was for them to fall in love with the science and to want to do more,” says Ms. Tweedie-Pitre, who was awarded a Special Award for Independent Outreach Honorarium funded equally by X-Oceans Outreach and an EDI Capacity grant from the StFX Biology Department.
She planned everything before she left StFX in spring, organized the outreach activities, and shipped the equipment north.
The outreach was particularly important to her, she says, as her experience in the Territories has been that there’s not a lot of drive to pursue much after high school. “Kids don’t realize what else is out there.”
She wanted to help inspire the youth, to show them opportunities that are available.
“Seeing them enjoy it so much, and to find it fascinating, that was kind of my goal, for them to see that science is cool,” she says. “It was great to see them be open and interactive and super into it, and being passionate about it the way I am.”
During each two-hour presentation, she conducted several hands-on, interactive experiments with the students, talking about such subjects as density, proportions of water, and fish and diversity. The students looked under microscopes and even extracted DNA from strawberries.
“I think they loved it,” says Ms. Tweedie-Pitre who spent about a week in the lab with StFX biology senior lab instructor and X-Oceans director Regina Cozzi going over the experiments before she left.
“Victoria did a phenomenal job providing ocean-related STEM activities to youth in her hometown,” Ms. Cozzi says. “From the beginning, she showed strong initiative in designing and planning the program workshops. She contacted the school educators, planned and prepared the activities at StFX, and then delivered the workshops to the communities. We are very proud of everything she accomplished this summer!”
Ms. Tweedie-Pitre says she wanted to get the students thinking about what they want to do during and after high school.
“They don’t love school, it’s something the kids do. Attendance isn’t very high, especially after Grade 7 and 8. I wanted to show them how you can connect all this to the real world.
“It was such a heartwarming thing to see that they were super interested.”
Going back to her former high school to share her love of science and talk about what’s she currently doing was also a highlight, she says.
While the outreach work was a great success, the road there was not always easy.
Hay River experienced a devastating flood the day she was expected to land. The town had to be evacuated. It was a traumatizing time for the town, she says, where everything shut down, including the schools.
When they eventually reopened, she was still keen to present, and says it was nice to be able to bring some joy and fun to children who had undergone such a traumatic event.
Ms. Tweedie-Pitre says she was so happy to receive the support from StFX to help underrepresented youth in the north.
“I was overjoyed and smiling so big,” she recalls. “I was so happy because I could bring something back to my home community.”
