Pictured above: Nicole and Pete's 3-4 class photo from the 2008-2009 FSP yearbook.
Beloved teachers, Nicole Favreau and Pete Nowak have long been a special part of the FSP community. Back in 2008, Nicole and Pete taught third and fourth-grade together. Grace, Nathaniel, Grace, Nathaniel, Sam, Owen, Bianca, Abby, Randa, Darrah, Daniel, Megan, Yacob, Jenaya, Violet, and Elena might all have a story or two to share from their time as third and fourth-grade students during Nicole and Pete’s first year at FSP. Pete remembers one of the highlights when they took the 3-4 class to Vinalhaven… exploring tidepools, finding sea cucumbers, and students singing along to former head James Grumbach playing guitar.
This coming 2022-2023 school year, Nicole and Pete will once again be a grade level team as Nicole steps into a new role as the lead 7-8 science teacher.
Nicole, who majored in Environmental Studies with a Plant Science minor at the University of Vermont, spent her summers in college thinking about plants both wild and domesticated. One favorite summer was spent as a backcountry wilderness forest ranger, tending to wilderness trail systems, exploring the backcountry with horses and rucksacks of canned food, and cataloging the western wildflowers of the High Uinta Mountains in the Wasatch Cache National Forest of Utah. She remembers that she was even convinced to dress up like Smokey the Bear on a fire safety float at one point!
Her love of gardening began in Washington State the following summer with the Oregon Tilth Association where she learned how to run a market farm and CSA in the semi-arid cherry orchards of the Cascade Mountains. She shared her love of plants and the wilderness with students as an outdoor educator for the Chewonki Foundation for several years, helping Chewonki to write a new curriculum and always thinking up meaningful adventures to take middle and high school kids along including hiking Vermont's Long Trail, a month long study of sustainable agriculture in Italy, or experiencing life along the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail. Nicole’s work with Chewonki led her to go back to school for a master's degree and inspired her to begin the FSP Outing Club back in 2008 after finding her teaching home at FSP. “I have been fortunate to be a part of helping to build the FSP community ever since, with opportunities for teachers to teach what they are passionate about, like studying the work of early botanist Kate Furbish through a unit on native flowering plants on the FSP campus and helping to install a pollinator garden at the new campus. I hope to bring my passion for botany, biology, soil science, and ecology to the classroom this fall as seventh and eighth-grade students begin to ask questions about truth.”
Looking ahead, Nicole is excited to explore these essential questions with students in her first year teaching seventh and eighth-grade science at FSP:
How do we know when something is true? (Inquiry)
How do we tell the true story about our waste (in our water, on our land, and in our air)?
How do we defend the truth? (Reflection)
How do we use data to defend the truth about pollutants in our environment?
How do we stay committed to the truth? (Action)
How do we stay committed to telling the truth through our actions (stewardship and ecological restoration) in our environment?