The Community, Connections & Commerce Podcast, presented by OUE & St. Clairsville Chamber - Community and Connections Season 2 Episode 8 with Dr. Yahn

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Welcome to Community and Connections. I'm your host, Drake Watson, along with my co-host, Jason Garcic, and we are thrilled to be joined by our guest, high character person, Dr. Jacqueline Yon, Ohio University Eastern's professor. Jacqueline, it's good to be with you this morning. Good to be with you both. Thanks for having me. Good morning.

Thank you for being here. So talk to us about just initially kind of an overview of what you do for Ohio University Eastern. Okay. So at the Eastern campus, I'm an associate professor. of teacher education. I work with students in both the early and elementary degree program and the middle childhood program. I'm also the campus coordinator for the middle childhood program. A little more broadly at Ohio University, I teach students in education across all five of our regional higher education campuses. I'm also the assistant department chair for the department of teacher

education and we're six campus wide department and i also direct a fellowship for rural teachers throughout the regional higher education network and is that building bridges to careers they are i'm so proud to say so i get a big smile on my face whenever i talk about them they are our community partner and so when i talk about that fellowship it is truly co-designed co-led with building bridges to careers. We share the funding model, the infrastructure. I'm the director and my colleague at building bridges to careers is what we call our program coordinator. So we truly share and it's truly a mutually beneficial partnership. All right. Well, we'll get a little deeper into that in several moments. But first of all, if you could just talk to us about your beginnings

in this profession and kind of what made you choose the field that you're in and your inspiration for doing what you do now? So something that's really unique about me, and I'm proud to talk about it. I'm going to talk about it on this podcast because I hope there's other listeners who I love the Eastern Campus like I do, but I'm the second generation of my family to teach at the Eastern Campus. My grandfather, Bill Bartles, was one of the first professors when the campus was starting. We actually have a picture of him and one of my aunts out when out in front of our campus

that was still dirt. They were still doing the landscaping. So that's a big part of my story. Another big piece of my story, if you're familiar with Dysert Woods in Belmont County, Ohio, Ohio University up until 2023 was the stewards of Dysert Woods. And my grandparents, Bill and Bernice, were the first caretakers there from 1968 to 1994. And then my aunt and uncle, Anne and Mitch Bartles, were the caretakers there from 1994 to 2004. So truly my start into what I do at the Eastern campus, what I do at OU at large, and I mean my research, my teaching, my service started growing up at this place where I got to interact with boards of trustee members, researchers from throughout the U.S., graduate students, field trips that were happening there, university presidents, that's really what was the inspiration for. I think I want to go into this field, all of my family on my dad's side, and also my mom

are in education or in public education. So that's how it started. It has been the privilege of my life, though, 12 years ago to get to come back and be a professor at the Eastern campus. So that's what got me to OUE. That's awesome. No, that's awesome. I want to talk more about Dysert Woods. But let's go, can we go back to building bridges to careers? Tell us a little bit about that. Tell us how it got started and what your involvement is with that. Okay, so this is a really neat story as well. The executive director, Dr. Toshawary, we met in graduate school at OU. We were both working on our doctoral degrees and we met and she was dreaming up the possibilities of building bridges to careers. She was a practicing teacher at Marietta City Schools. So building bridges

to careers started out of Washington County, Ohio. They were initially meant to strategically service Washington County, Ohio, they now have a network, and this is a key part of their relationship with us that spans all of Appalach in Ohio. So if you think of our regional higher education service region, that is their network service region. We run parallel to each other. They do exactly what it sounds like. They bridge the gap between PK through 12 education and the community at large, and they bridge the gap between education and employment. And it's just phenomenal what they do. And they help really the public education sector connect with all the different sectors in the community. So think your businesses, yes, your business sectors, but also your nonprofits, your local

government. And they do it in a number of different ways. One of the flagship things we do is the real world problem scenario. There's the rural teacher fellowship that we talked about earlier. They do things called teacher tours. They do career awareness days. And they also very strategically involve students' families, which is often a missing piece of this work. So when they think about it, it's really a kind of ecosystem approach, and it's kind of a wraparound approach. But bottom line, we want kids throughout Southeast Ohio to see the possibilities in their communities. That's the heart of what they do. You talk about Appalachian, Ohio, very rural, a lot of times there's fields and there's woods, and that's maybe all that there is. And that's, if I'm not wrong,

one of your passions, just reading a little bit about you beforehand, is people in the rural and Appalachian areas, particularly in Ohio and kind of in the southern part of the Ohio Valley. Absolutely. The shortcut to how that went from, okay, so I'm a rural kid. I grew up here in the Ohio Valley. My husband grew up here in the Ohio Valley. We're both generational to the region, and we very much wanted to live and raise our family here. But when I first started my career, I was in Columbus, Ohio, for a number of reasons, primarily because my husband's engineering job was there. And I did my master's degree at Ohio State, and it was a phenomenal master's program. I'm a bobcat through and through. So I'm sorry for the OSU fans, but I bleed green and white. But it was a phenomenal master's program, but what I quickly realized is they were never talking about schools, like the one I grew up in, the ones I was familiar. with and those schools exist throughout the entire US right rural and small town schools exist

throughout the entire US and so that lit a fire and under me of I think with my doctoral degree I want to go this route and I want to focus my research and teaching on that you think about the districts I don't want to single anyone out but a majority of the districts and the schools in the valley are are in those rural and Appalachian areas that you described and I think it's you know to your point sometimes can be overlooked do you see that so when you say that the rural and Appalachian areas in the schools perhaps might be overlooked in favor of some more urban population centers, what does that look like? In what ways do you think there's that disconnect? So one of the big disconnects is just about how we think about laws

and policies in a state like Ohio or West Virginia or Pennsylvania. So I'm just talking about the tri-state area. And the difference about how that might structure. impact an urban school or suburban school versus a rural school, right? Just the sheer, even things with school funding, understanding the difference of a rural school and what their funding needs are and what their tax base is going to look like versus an urban tax base. Like here's a really quick example. There are some grant programs that are meant to, you know, you get the grant, you use it

for two or three years, and then you become self-sustaining beyond that. And one time one of the districts I was working with said, you know, we're sitting in this meeting in the central part of the state. And people are talking about how they're going to go to all these different car dealerships and all these places to, like, sustain their funding after the grant. And they're sitting there going, we don't have a car dealership in our entire county. We don't have that type of, it's not that we don't have an economy, but our economy looks different. So this model that you're selling to us isn't going to work for sustainability after. And so that's one of the things. Also, a lot of rural problems are hidden from site.

Like you drive through urban and suburban areas and you can see their strengths and you can see the trouble spots. A lot of times you can't see things like rural homelessness or underemployment and rural areas. It's not visible when you drive through on the interstate. And also another example, like you just think about something you take for granted all the time, especially in a place like maybe Wheeling or Columbus, as you said, Internet. I mean, it can be very tough. You have increasingly more amounts of school that is done online, and it can be a big

challenge for somebody who lives in Monroe County or rural Washington County to have Internet access and things like that. Absolutely. And I'd also add that a lot of times people aren't aware of the assets in rural communities, because what we see as an asset might look different than what is an asset in a suburban or a metropolitan area. Like our generational structure is an asset. asset for us. It is a fundraising asset, right? But that just looks different in a rural area than

it does in other places. So going back to the building bridges to careers, do you want to give us any examples of successful stories that have come out of this program? Do you want me to talk specifically about our fellowship that we? Yeah, yeah. So let me explain just a little bit about the fellowship briefly. So the Ohio Rural Teacher Fellowship, like I said, co-designed, co-led, truly a collaboration. Our goal is when we recruit fellows and to our fellowship, they are practicing teachers and rural and small town schools. They can be from anywhere in the regional higher education at service region, which again is the same as building bridges to careers network. And we recruit them to work with us for three years and we're able to fund that work

they do for three years. And the one parameter we put around it is that the project, the work they develop with their students has to fall under this umbrella called community and career connected learning. And it's a lot of what you're talking about on this podcast. The idea is you integrate community partnerships, career awareness, into experiential place-based learning with the students in your classroom. And some of these teachers are teaching high school students, some have middle school students, some have elementary age students, right?

So our teachers teach all different grade levels. from there we pair them with a mentor most of our mentors come from building bridges to career staff so they're deeply immersed in this work they have a sense of what works what might not work how to help you troubleshoot problems and again it's a three-year endeavor so it's not okay year one i have to show some success metric which is really exhausting to teachers so from that model we've had some really neat successes come out of it so a fun one to talk about is dr katio Brian at Union Local High School. She used her fellowship to develop a partnership with Towngate Theater, which is just down the road from where we're sitting in this studio today. And that partnership, what was really neat is that the kids got to work with a theater on one of their productions. They read the play, learned about the content of the play, but then learned how a community

theater works. And Towngate would come in and they would pitch to the students a problem they were having with the production that year. students would try to help solve that problem. They would pitch possible solutions. Often, Towngate would use one of their solutions. And the kids also got to go on site to the theater and really see the behind the scenes there

and attend one of the productions. So we have a lot of success stories, but Katie's is a fun one to tell because it also gets you to give a little shout out to Towngate for the community partner work. Yeah, no doubt. That's awesome. So this might be obvious,

but I'm thinking a lot about how you're not, necessarily. I mean, you think teacher, you think of a high school teacher, you think of a middle school teacher. And that's not you, but you are teaching people who are of similar age to on how to beat those kinds of people. So kind of indirectly, I imagine you feel very strongly about the role that a teacher can play in a young person's life. So I'm raising a young son. My son, Liam, is just turned six here in the Ohio Valley. I have two nephews growing up here in the Ohio Valley. So I think about this all the time. I think about the role teachers played in my life. And because my family is in public education, I often get to talk to people

informally who say, oh, you're Mr. Bartle's daughter or you're the other Mr. Bartle's niece or you're Mrs. Kemp's niece. And they tell me, you know, the influence they had. So it's very visible to me. And my husband actually has a story about one of his teachers and how they led him into the field of engineering. So absolutely. That's why this fellowship that we're talking about is really important because it's a way we can give back to our alumni. But two other things I just want to mention is through our fellowship and our funding structure, we bring programming directly into our students at OU at the Eastern campus. And because of many of my classes, I teach five campus wide, some of that programming reaches five campus wide. And so that's really important that before

you even go out, you're getting experience and we introduce you to building bridges to careers because I want to keep them front and center. It's only possible with this really strong community partner. And then the really exciting thing is starting next year, we will have a full program called the Rural Teacher Corps. And that program will be for five to eight students every year at the Eastern campus who want to get the same experience as our Rural Teacher Fellows before they graduate and again it'll be fully funded we're really really excited about this piece so it's back to your point drake that if we want teachers to be able to do this type of work we've got to fund them we've got to support them we've got to pair them with a strong community

partner i cannot say enough good things about building bridges to careers and then we have to give them the hands-on opportunity so now we're going to be able to do that not just for our alumni but also for students in our programs yeah with that and mind, if you could kind of put yourself in the shoes of a, whether it be elementary, middle school, high school, any age kid that lives, maybe they live on a dirt road, in a township with less than 300 people, they walk onto their front porch, they look one way, they see a field, they look the other way, they see woods, and maybe there's another house off in the distance. There are 20 plus minutes from their nearest school. What specifically does that kid in your mind need

in a teacher? What kind of force does a teacher need to be or can be in that child's life? So this is an excellent question. I wish more people ask this question. And I just described a majority of the Ohio Valley. Correct. And I just finished up a research study that myself and a team did. We just finished it up about a year ago where we looked at teachers in two school districts that had done immersive work on this. So we started to answer your question. But first and foremost, you need a teacher who sees the assets in the community. There's actually, you know, professional development we do with where we teach teachers to look and do something called asset mapping. But to keep it short today, they need to look around and they need to see the assets.

And you need to remember that assets, particularly in our rural and small town communities, are not just your economy like who makes money. Your assets are your nonprofits. Your assets are your four-age groups. Your assets are your religious community, your politically active community. It is an asset to have political tensions in a community, right? We treat this as like this is this great polarization. No, you want a two-party system and your community. You want tensions to come to the surface so you can solve problems.

So first and foremost, you need a teacher that sees the assets. Second, okay, we know. There's a lot of things we don't know from research. But one thing we do know about rural communities, when you look at kids that then become the 30 and 40-year-olds in the community, why did you come back or why did you stay? Positive experience in their school. And that doesn't mean straight a positive experience. It means I felt valued.

I felt valued in this community. Positive experience with, think of groups like 4-age, youth groups, things like that, strong intergenerational structure. those are big things that bring kids back so you also need a teacher who radiates i want to be here and that's something i think at the eastern campus we bring our our professors whether they're originally from the region or moved into the region often radiate this is where i want to be and the same is true for teachers and third you need to see the value of a kids network their close family and friend network you need to believe those people matter and that student's life

and bring them in to the fray of what's going on at the school. The school and the community have to be mutually beneficial to each other. I think you make a great point because if you think about a kid like that, who's the people that they talk to every day? They've got their family members, whoever that may be. They've got their, you know, they're with all their classmates, but they've got their close group of five or so friends and all their teachers. And so, you know, that's very woven into kind of who they're talking to on a daily basis.

Yeah, that's one of the first things we do when we do our onboarding with our new fellows in the program. When we do our onboarding in the fall with our rural teacher course or our undergraduate students, when I go out and work with a district and we're doing professional development through building bridges to careers, the first thing we do is put up this really vibrant visual where we show them, all kids have social capital. They all come in with social capital. But exactly what you said, Drake, it starts with, here's my close family and friends and maybe something like 4.8. or something that I'm involved in. It's a very tight network.

We can build their social capital through the type of programming building bridges to careers does with schools where you introduce them to other folks in the community and they build that. But that's not just an individual social capital. That's a social capital for you, right? Jason, think about your work, right?

You talked about working with fourth graders from Barnesville School. Then you become visible to them. They remember meeting the dog, the courthouse. You become visible, and that also builds a social capital for the work that you do. So it's really a wraparound thing. I'll let you jump in, Jason. This is very interesting.

No, this is really awesome. No, really learning a lot of things here. So you talked about this new program that you have coming up with about five to eight students that you're going to be having at the campus. Sounds like you have goals for this to grow. And where do you envision a program like this for rural teachers to expand to and grow into? So we started the fellowship programming in 2021 and have really built. We've now had three fellows graduate from our program. Now remember, they work with us, the practicing teachers work with us for three years.

And that might not sound like a lot, right, that we've had three fully complete the program and we have three returning next year and we'll be bringing in four to five more teachers. Every year we're able to fund four to five incoming teachers. But when you think about it, it's a big success for us that we've had three teachers in the region successfully complete, and we've got, you know, four more in the pipeline. So it's been a journey to then say how can we provide fully funded programming for undergraduate students? Because all of this takes going after grants, going after donors, and really getting that support because we want to actually be able to pay people for the work they're doing, and we want to be able to support their projects and give them financial backing for their projects. So I think your question is, what are some of our goals? So goal one is to consistently be able to admit five to eight students at the Eastern

campus into this program. There is high potential for us to eventually open that up to other regional campuses as well, but right now we're going to really focus on the Eastern campus. So that's goal one. Goal two is that those students see success with a community focus project. So they'll work together as a group on that. instead of individually, our practicing teachers, it's an individual project for their classroom.

The students will work collaboratively to really have that supportive network and see success. But that's goal too, because if I believe, and my partners at Building Bridges believe if they see that success in undergraduate work, then they'll believe they can do it in their own classrooms. And goal three is they develop a strong relationship with building bridges to careers

and become part of their network. And many of our districts throughout our region, are working with building bridges to careers. So when you go into your job interview and you say, hey, I've already worked with them through two years through this program at the Eastern Campus, this is not just a line on the resume, it's a talking point in the interview.

And I think that's really important, especially in the field of education, we want to know you have experience. And they're going to get to talk about that, but also how that experience can be bridged into what they're doing in their classroom. what are some of the the challenges that you face and not only yourself in your profession but what are some challenges that you sit you know maybe there's somebody who's they come to

college and they say you know i've wanted to be a teacher my entire life i'm very passionate about it but for whatever reason one challenge or setback or another you know that's not an option for them what are some of the the challenges that you see i think a really significant challenge for teachers is the amount of time. Okay, so for pre-service teachers, that's what we call students in our program. You'll hear two terms, either pre-service teachers or teacher candidates. One challenge that I see over and over is the amount of time we ask them to spend in the field. And you would say, well, hey, Jacqueline, isn't that a good thing?

Yes, because they're getting a lot of experience. But what I want to remind everybody is my teacher education students are not just going to school. Most of them are also working. I worked through almost how I came out of undergrad without debt was a mix of scholarships and working shout out to respect foods who employed me through college. So a little PR for them. But seriously. So one challenge is that balance, you know, and the part of where they're in the field and

in class all has to happen in that regular business working Monday through Friday. So that to me is one significant thing of just they're getting burnout very quickly. And we're actually talking about that. I mentioned I'm assistant department chair. And we're actually talking about that. Like how do we pull this back a little bit so this is more manageable? So that's one. Another is financial.

And again, I think people think of, well, regional campuses were a really reasonable rate. We do a lot of things to make an education affordable. But I want to remind people the cost of living is still steep for students, right? They have to pay for gas, food, sometimes sharing and living like housing. expenses and things and things like books and stuff like that. And I think we just can never forget that that's a challenge. And the third is there's a difference between experiencing school as you're a student, right? Like I'm a student. So people come into the program, everybody thinks they know school because they've been doing it for 12 plus years. They've only been on one

side of the door. Right. And often my students have had really successful experiences with school. That's some of why they want to be a teacher. They've had successful experiences in their community. not always but often and then they go out into schools and they see you know a range of issues yeah and that can be disheartening right so we we have to talk about and build up that self-efficacy that i can do this and that you may be the turning point in a kid's life sure or you may be the turning point and bringing something into your community that didn't exist so i think those are the the big three that i would talk about yeah especially in a small rural area being You know, because sometimes you'll have a student who goes to school and then they don't see much of their family because they're out working 50, 60 hours a week.

And so that teacher really has a heightened opportunity to be the kind of life-changing force in their life. And one of the reasons it was kind of easy for me to think of that question that I asked just a moment ago is because I knew somebody just like that. You know, they were going into teaching at Ohio Eastern and was really passionate about it. That's what they wanted to do. and then figured out how much experience was going to be needed and kind of had to sit back and say, I've got to work. I just don't have time for it.

So it was a very tough, tough thing. But yeah, that's good insight as far as the challenges that are faced in the industry. And one thing I want to say is that's why when we imagined, okay, how can we add an undergraduate piece to the rural teacher fellowship, I was really adamant as were my partners of building bridges to careers, it has to be funded, meaning the students have to earn a stipend for

this. It cannot just be, hey, you get to be part of this school program, because quite frankly, that's disingenuous to the amount of work they're doing. Yes, it's this exciting thing and exciting experience, but they are already over inundated in all this field experience they have to do with no financial gain. And we sometimes just dismiss that teachers deserve to be paid for their work. So I want to instill in them when you do something an opportunity like this, look for the funded opportunities. I think that's a good precedent to set for them. So that's something we're proud of is the students that enroll in that will be funded for their work. Awesome. And if we could switch gears just a little bit. I know we were talking about Dysert Woods.

You'd mentioned that earlier. Would you like to talk about that in relation to the program? Sure. So Dysert Woods, as I said earlier, Ohio University, was the stewards of it from the time that it became open to the public in 1968 to 2023 and 2023 for a number of reasons. Captina Conservancy worked with OU to transfer the property, they are doing a phenomenal jobs. I'm just going to give if you have not been out there recently or you've not attended one of their first of the month Sunday hikes with Marshall, check out their Facebook page.

You should really do this. Okay, that's my plug. But they have become a phenomenal partner to us. So I'm personally passionate about Dysert Woods because I grew up seeing a lot of OU programming. So I wanted to bring that back into the fellowship for our practicing teachers and especially for our undergraduate students. So one of the exciting things that we're going to do out there in early September is that's where we'll kick off the rural teacher core for the Eastern students. They'll get to go out there for a day. They'll learn about all the experiential and place-based learning that has happened there over the years, things for elementary age kids, high school age kids.

things like that. They'll work to develop ideas about their own project that they all eventually lead out there for the community. So we're really going to build in a partnership with them because one of the challenges that Katina's facing is how do we get our youth and younger folks interested in Dysert? And so that will be the kind of real world problem we put in front of our rural teacher court members so that they really get that hands-on experience of working with a community partner right in the community and thinking about how to engage youth. So we're pretty excited about that, but we'll start it with kicking it off in the fall. Awesome. Well, real quick, we've got a couple minutes left. I've got two things for you. First of all, you're just quick thoughts very

quickly on AI in the classroom. I know that's a giant, I mean, that's not, that's a question that's worth a heck of a lot more than just a minute. Yes. But I think it's a good, so I'll give you my quick thoughts. Right now, I'm treating it like I've traded every technological advance in my career. And there's been a lot. Correct. And right now I'm trying to teach my future, my students, you're going to be future educators, how to use it as an assistive tool, how to use it for tasks that they're spending way too much time on, like creating rubrics. So I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of it. But right now, just to really get them into it, I'm trying to teach them, how can you use this as a way that enhances your classroom. And then as I become better educated on myself,

I imagine integrating even different ideas. I don't think they should be scared of it. I think they should see it as any other jump in tech. How do we use this to improve our classroom? Yeah. That's the thing I've heard many times as well. And I've heard it been compared to a calculator in the sense that way back when, before I could remember, there was a time where, okay, we're going have a math test. Can we use a calculator? Can we not use a calculator? Right. And kind of AI follows suit with that. Last thing we have for you before we want to be respectful of your time. We've talked ad nauseum about the area and the community and everything else. And I want to get your take on what makes the Ohio Valley a great place to live. You've talked a lot about

people coming back, people staying here. Why do they stay here? What are your thoughts on what makes this area a great place to live? I love this question. I had to answer a version of this a few years ago for an interview with the Times leader. So first of all, I love it here. My husband and I are both generational to the region. He owns and operates Yon Electric company just down the street. He's the third generation of his family to own and operate it. And I think there's a few things we'd say.

One, the generational nature of our community makes it a great place to raise a family and live as yourself because you have lots of people who care not just about you and you have that network, but they care about this place. the Ohio Valley, and it's unlike anywhere else I've traveled in the U.S. The second thing I'm going to say, especially, you know, we're in the summer months right now as we're recording this, is you can really be out in the community if you choose in the Ohio Valley. Like tomorrow night, my son and I will go to the Warwood Farmer's Market.

We live just a few miles from there. I live over here in West Virginia, and that market has something for everybody. If all ages is intentionally inclusive of the community, including programming for kids, And there are things like that that exist all week, every day, not just in the summer months, but in the fall, winter, spring. So I think that opportunity to be out in the community at all different ages and stages of your life. And the third thing is I would say, so I'm a proud graduate of Martin's Ferry High School, I think a lot of us that come from the small town and rural schools would say we were given

this sense of pride in our community. And again, I've traveled a lot of places in the U.S. I've worked with a lot of school districts in the U.S. There's nothing like it, like what it is here. And so I think those three things really realizing that and that sense of personal self-efficacy you can build, but also that community efficacy, that community social capital, it's just a really unique thing we have here

that I think makes us very special in the Ohio Valley. Yeah, 100%. Well, thank you for your time. We appreciate you to spend spending the time with us. Once again, Dr. Jacqueline Yon. from Ohio University Eastern. I'm Drake Watson and Jason Garsick, and we appreciate everybody for listening

and have a great day.