One of our School of Education doctoral graduates, from Teacher Education & Higher Education, Dr. Patricia (Trish) Patrick, is now in Bengkulu, Indonesia visiting with Mr. Aceng at the University of Bengkulu for a week. Trish is the fifth faculty member at UNCG or with ties to UNCG to travel to Bengkulu to work with Mr. Aceng, faculty member in Science & Science Education.
Drs. Catherine Matthews, Jay Lennartson, Corey Johnson and Ms. Ann Somers have all been to Bengkulu to work with Mr. Aceng within the last year a half. Two former UNCG undergraduates, Douglas Lawton and Allison Sermarini, completed international study abroad stays there too.
Dr. Patrick recently (2017) edited the book Preparing Informal Science Educators: Perspectives from Science Communication and Education,
in which Dr. Matthews and Dr. Aceng Ruyani co-authored a chapter titled, A Comparative Look at Informal Science Education and Environmental Education in Bengkulu Province, Indonesia and North Carolina, USA .
Following the stop in Bengkulu, Dr. Patrick is visiting Borneo, where she is the evaluator on an NSF-sponsored project. She will be collecting data there from local people about the work students from Texas Tech University did this past summer. The Tech students were there to do research on the local flora and fauna and suggest to farmers that sustainable farming could be good for the economy. Planting palm trees is not sustainable because they are destroying the natural farmland. The idea is to get the local farms to keep the forests in tact and grow things that would naturally occur. One such product is ginger.
Dr. Patrick is currently a faculty member at Columbus State University where she is starting a degree program in Informal Science Education.
