This past spring, Precious Oyewole ’24 explored birds and bird communication with her “birding buddy” – a student at the Tompkins-Seneca-Tioga Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).
The pair were part of a group of nine Cornell students and nine high school students with disabilities or communication challenges in the BOCES Career Program who met for 12 weeks as part of the A BIRDSONG Program.
At the end of the semester, Oyewole and her partner combined their new bird knowledge with the partner’s love of dinosaurs to create their final project.
“Creating this engaging lesson plan was particularly rewarding, because of how happy and proud she was to help create something that allowed her to share her passion with the entire class,” Oyewole said. “Participating in the BIRDSONG Program has been a transformative experience, allowing me to strengthen my ability to communicate scientific concepts effectively to individuals with differing abilities.”
BIRDSONG (Building Inclusive Research and Designing Supportive Outreach and Networking for Growing talents) is a collaboration between the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, BOCES and Cornell students. The community-engaged outreach program is the brainchild of Nora Prior, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and was funded in part by the Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, through their Engaged Opportunity Grant program.
