About

T. Beth Sims is a lifelong learner and recovering academic. Over the last 2 decades, Beth has worked on 3 continents with students from kindergarten through graduate level delivering project-based instruction. Beth has directed groups through such diverse efforts as developing an annual international film festival exploring the theme of Geography featuring work produced exclusively by middle school students and creating large community art installations using materials collected by students from area rubbish heaps and discarded cafeteria waste. In 2005, Beth received a Gilder-Lehrman History fellowship at Princeton University for work done by her 5th grade class researching the connections between farming techniques and social structures in Haiti under French colonial rule and the country’s current deforestation and erosion crisis. For Beth’s students, a typical lesson may involve anything from a guest speaker coming in to discuss the process of how subsistence farmers in Sikkim organized to pass legislation for a statewide ban on plastic shopping bags to class members initiating and conducting school-wide surveys to determine and report on each grade level’s environmental footprint.