Duplissie Named 2015 Maine Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year

Kevin Duplissie, director and head teacher of the Child Study Center at the University of Maine, has been named the 2015 Maine Agriculture in the Classroom (MAITC) Teacher of the Year.

Duplissie, who also teaches psychology courses in cognitive and social development in children at UMaine, has been working at the university for 27 years and teaching at the Child Study Center for 12 years.

The preschool education center offers a developmentally based curriculum focused on agriculture, art, language and self-help. The center also serves as a lab for the UMaine Psychology Department and other academic programs.

Duplissie, who has been using Ag in the Classroom’s food, land and people curriculum since 2008, integrates agriculture into every subject and conducts several agriculture-related activities with the college students and preschool children each week.

“I’m from northern Maine,” Duplissie says. “I grew up surrounded by agriculture so it’s second nature to me. A lot of preschool and college students don’t understand the importance of agriculture in our lives.”

Teaching children about agriculture while they’re young is important, Duplissie says, because at the preschool age, they’re learning and retaining information quickly.

“If they can learn about agriculture now, they can build upon it later,” he says. “If you explain and demonstrate agriculture to children, they’re able to grasp it, understand it and work with it.”

Each year, MAITC recognizes an outstanding elementary or secondary school teacher who uses agricultural education materials and/or activities in the classroom.

With Duplissie’s guidance, preschool children build greenhouses, plant gardens, visit farms and hatch chicks every year at the center. Teaching children where their food comes from is an important focus of the curriculum.

“We make snacks with the children, and they know where it comes from,” he says, adding the students grew pumpkins and made cookies and muffins with them during the fall. “We relate it all back to agriculture and the farms that grow their food. Good nutrition is easy to relate back to agriculture. Everything we eat comes from farms.”

At the center, Duplissie works with college students from several majors, including marine science, early development and nursing. He says he enjoys watching the students learn while they teach others.

“I get the chance to work with students who see and use education firsthand,” he says. “The more experience and the more you do things, the more it sticks with you. We want them to see and follow children’s development, and help enhance it.”

MAITC is a grassroots program coordinated by the United States Department of Agriculture and housed at the Maine Department of Agriculture. The primary funding source in Maine is the agriculture specialty license plate. Programs are designed to help preschool through 12th grade students gain a greater awareness of the role of agriculture in their daily lives so they will become citizens who support wise agricultural policies and local agriculture endeavors.

Duplissie and his program have received several MAITC grants to fund the agriculture curriculum at the Child Study Center. The program uses lesson plans available through MAITC and provides annual field trips to local farms and orchards.

“This recognition shows that our little program is doing some pretty neat things; even a small program like this can be reaching out. Our projects are being replicated by other teachers in other parts of the state and they are expanding something we have created,” he says.

Duplissie says even though he’s honored to be the 2015 MAITC Teacher of the Year, he doesn’t teach for recognition.

“I like what I’m doing,” he says. “I do it because I enjoy seeing the kids learn and grow. Those are the things that fuel me to continue on.”

As the 2015 MAITC Teacher of the Year, Duplissie will attend the National Agriculture in the Classroom conference in June 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky, where he will meet other teachers from around the country and abroad who are using agriculture to teach their students.

More about MAITC and the award are online.

Contact: Elyse Kahl, 207.581.3747