CKV: My Mom The Educator: An Interview With Kathy Chamberland
Kathy Chamberland retired from public school education in May 2014 after teaching for USD 286 in Sedan, Kansas, since 1974. She taught many different subject areas during her career including music, kindergarten, third grade, fourth grade, sixth grade, junior and senior high English, and Title I Reading. She received a Bachelor of Music Education from Southwestern College in 1974. In 1979, she began working on post-graduate elementary education certification at Emporia State University. Upon completing that, she continued at Emporia and completed a Reading Specialist endorsement in 1981 and a Master’s Degree in Elementary Education with an emphasis in reading in 1982. Kathy has also earned graduate hours from Pittsburg State University and Friends University.
Mrs. Chamberland served as an adjunct instructor of Children’s Literature for Independence Community College. In 2006, she began working for Newman University as an adjunct instructor at their satellite campus in Independence, Kansas. There she works with teacher education candidates and has taught a number of core classes and methods classes, and is currently a university supervisor for interns (student teachers).
In addition to teaching, Kathy has been very active in The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International since 1992. DKG is an international society of key women educators which has members in 17 countries worldwide. She has served in offices at the local and state levels. Currently she is Phi State (Kansas) Vice President and has been nominated as the next Phi State President for the 2017-2019 biennium. She is an active advocate for education, especially for public schools. Upon her retirement from teaching, Kathy ran for a position on the USD (Sedan) 286 School Board and is currently serving the second year of a four-year term.
Kathy has seen many changes since signing her first teaching contract in 1974, some good and some not-so-good. Yet she realizes that times are changing and education needs to keep step with the world. Our students deserve it.
This is a person I am proud to call Mom!
Mrs. Chamberland served as an adjunct instructor of Children’s Literature for Independence Community College. In 2006, she began working for Newman University as an adjunct instructor at their satellite campus in Independence, Kansas. There she works with teacher education candidates and has taught a number of core classes and methods classes, and is currently a university supervisor for interns (student teachers).
In addition to teaching, Kathy has been very active in The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International since 1992. DKG is an international society of key women educators which has members in 17 countries worldwide. She has served in offices at the local and state levels. Currently she is Phi State (Kansas) Vice President and has been nominated as the next Phi State President for the 2017-2019 biennium. She is an active advocate for education, especially for public schools. Upon her retirement from teaching, Kathy ran for a position on the USD (Sedan) 286 School Board and is currently serving the second year of a four-year term.
Kathy has seen many changes since signing her first teaching contract in 1974, some good and some not-so-good. Yet she realizes that times are changing and education needs to keep step with the world. Our students deserve it.
This is a person I am proud to call Mom!
For this project, we were documenting a piece of Kansas history as a part of the project Celebrate Kansas Voices. Originally starting in 2010, Celebrate Kansas Voices is a "statewide digital history project empowering learners to become digital witnesses, archiving local oral history and sharing that history safely on the global stage of the internet."
As a part of this project, we were supposed to create either an iMovie or an Adobe Slate about a piece of Kansas history. I decided to do my project over my mother, Kathy Chamberland. She has always been heavily involved with education in Kansas, even after her retirement. She is also one of the defining inspirations with my decision in becoming a teacher.
This project took more time and effort than I had expected. I am not very good at using the iMovie app, only because I don't have a lot of experience with it. iMovie has a lot of cool features I wouldn't have known about if I didn't explore the app itself and Apple's website that had an abundance of information about the program. I used iMovie and the camera on my iPad to produce this movie. The camera has editing features that I used to crop and brighten some of my pictures to use for this movie.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project. I loved being able to get my mother involved as well. My family home contributed the family pictures as well as the backdrop for the interview. This project was definitely a labor of love to create but I feel that it is a story and a person worth talking about and sharing. She is someone to admire for her dedication towards the furthering of education, no matter how old you are.